Soul Music, Sweet and Sour

 

Fan theories and spoilers throughout. 

I was chuffed to see someone else enjoying Soul Music recently.  It was one book I didn’t really appreciate until I reread it recently. I liked all the jokes and bad puns and music references, but found it a bit silly. I hadn’t spotted the bitter dark chocolate heart in the middle of the occasionally sickly sweet fun. I was too distracted.

I found some amazing writing once I started looking. 

1) TP is the FIRST to write orphans or boarding school themes within a short while of us hearing of the situation of the Romanian Orphans which broke in 1990. Rowling, Pulman, Martin etc all came after TP publishing Soul Music in 1994. It turns out there was a small but growing movement discussing Boarding School Syndrome in the UK in the early 90s too - exposing the fact that children placed too young in institutions, even elite ones, could be damaged by the experience (work of Duffel, Beard, later Shcaverein). 

I hadn’t seen the parallels between the Dean and Susan in this respect. TP doesn’t make a huge thing out of it, but they’d both been crushed by institutional living at too early an age. 

“He said, much later on, on the day when the music died, that it must have been because he’d never been really young, or at least young while just being old enough to know he was young. Like most wizards, he’d begun his training while still so small that the official pointy hat came down over his ears. And after that he’d just been, well, a wizard.”“

I found it strangely moving how this young man, in becoming the equivalent of a monk from a young age, albeit a rather well fed one, has become in part of the potentially suffocating and self reinforcing vicious circle of total institutional living, voiced by the narrator :

“Unseen University was used to eccentricity among the faculty. After all, humans derive their notions of what it means to be a normal human being by constant reference to the humans around them, and when those humans are other wizards, the spiral can only wiggle downward.”

In one sense, is it any wonder that, facing this depersonalisation process, living such a cloistered life, that many of the wizards turn to drink, excessive eating and then develop such quirky tendencies - their only way of expressing their individuality.

Despite Susan saying she didn’t care about what Miss Butts (the headmistress) thought, the minute she went outside the school routine she couldn’t move for fear Miss Butts wouldn’t approve!  

-“She disliked woolly thinking, which in any case was a major misdemeanour under the regime of Miss Butts.”

-“The image of Miss Butts rose like a Valkyrie in Susan’s mind.”

-“Spread below was Ankh-Morpork—a city containing more Peril than even Miss Butts could imagine.”

-“No. Miss Butts says it’s just made-up stories with little literary content.”

-”If you could be invisible to Miss Butts, everyone else was easy.”

-”She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner, and was tall in every respect except height.”

2) The stories of Imp and Susan are really closely paralleled. 

They both have a special gift - his music, hers invisibility; 

they’re different from other kids - he’s emo, she’s hard like a diamond; 

they’re both without family - he falls out with his dad, her parents are dead; 

they both take an irrational choice - him to choose Ankh Morpork instead of Quirm, her to follow the advice of the rat and raven despite it’s risk of being soppy; 

they both have a troll and dwarf friends; 

they both have their life course overtaken - him by the music, her by her inheriting. 

Then they differ because everything goes beyond Imp/Buddy’s control once the music and Dibble both take over, so he gets more and more passive, whereas Susan starts to become less passive from having crushed by school and unresolved child bereavement and more adolescent, and she’s the “hero” who saves the life of the “damsel in distress”. 

3) How deeply the bereavement theme goes. 

I was puzzled at what exactly DEATH had lost as the echoes with what he says about what he can remember don’t fit with what we know about Ysabel, his daughter. Until I realised they all tie in neatly with Susan’s memories. The word that gave it away for me in the end was “laughter”. He may have  laughed with Ysabel, but it’s Susan’s memories of laughter that stir like a hippo in the mud of memory, classic grandparent stuff. Hence it being a book about memory. Doh! The bathroom, the soap, the swing, the horse. Mort had stopped Susan visiting after the age of about 6 and had done everything so that she would forget, but DEATH couldn’t forget.

And then when DEATH had been in the gully with Ysabel and Mort and they decided that immortality wasn’t worth it I was really puzzled by why DEATH couldn’t look Susan in the eye.

 

“He climbed into the saddle and, still without turning to face her, spurred Binky out and over the gorge.”

Obviously I’m speculating about fiction here, but I wonder if TP was saying that DEATH was upset that they were choosing to leave him behind, or whether he was sad and angry that they were sort of abandoning his beloved granddaughter, Susan when they could have gone back to live with him and been there for her?

Also I discover it seems like it’s a thing for kids to not always react straight away or as we expect them to when they’re told bad news. Younger children or emotionally deprived children (like being stuck in a boarding school too young) don’t always know how to react or don’t feel secure enough, or don’t get enough privacy or time to think. Some people get labelled as “The Coper” when everyone else cracks up. Susan there for her grandfather not the other way round, 

“Sometimes the only thing you could do for people was to be there.

She rode Binky into the shadows by the cliff road, and waited. After a minute or two there was a clattering of stones and a horse and rider came up an almost vertical path from the riverbed.”

“Susan finally experiences relief when she’s able to grieve, showing she had had serious low lying unresolved issues after all. Depression is the most common childhood psychiatric disorder but as Mullen shows “it is often unrecognised and untreated.” This poorly visible type was known by the vague and now defunct term masked depression at the time Terry Pratchett was writing. Susan’s low level but persistent state would be hard to spot in her cultural context.

With sudden access to DEATH’s resources as well as his responsibilities she begins to question, to bargain, to think maybe her parents’ death could have been prevented, to express her anger, finishing with acceptance and tears following fairly classic grieving behaviour as presented by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in her seminal work Death and Dying, with stages which don’t in fact have to happen in total or in any precise order”

I also did some reading and discovered that DEATH's memory problems can be classic symptoms. I don't think TP had specialised knowledge as such but being a journalist and an observant person he'd seen a lot. Vivid reliving of bad memories (flash backs) can be linked with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and it seems can be particularly common when there's been a violent death. Vivid reliving of good memories can be linked to prolonged or unresolved grief. Anything that seriously disturbs living in the present can become pathological.

4) It seems that for anyone who has lived through disturbing circumstances the very best thing for developing resilience to have long term recovery is support.

I think for DEATH 

Albert risking his life to go looking for him was key to bringing him into the present.

Having Susan step up to the job however inexpertly meant she was at least partly reliable and had a sense of family, 

and she cared about him (she said she liked the swing and gave him a kiss),

she'd called to him to for help (to fix the disaster with the attempt to rescue the band),

she treated him like a parent (I'm sorry grandad - when replying about the state of the room).

For Susan there was Binky who gently nuzzled her hand, was as safe as a table after the anxiety of the Death of Rats and the coarse and direct raven Quoth. Binky does animal therapy! Plus he can read her thoughts and takes her everywhere she wants to go without judgement - even when she thinks grandfather or the Death of Rats would disapprove.

Then there was Albert, who is for me the star of the show. It’s the very unlikely figure of Albert who works out what Susan needs and reaches out to her as a human being. I see this as Susan’s pivotal moment. In discovering her immortality she’s also finding her humanity in a way that an institution couldn’t or at least didn’t do for her. Crusty old Albert is in a very real way the long lost relative Susan needed. Familiar, firm, kind but without fitting into any of the stereotyped apron-string roles that Boarding School Syndrome forces one to cut off from, despise even. Susan has not had this sort of parenting for a very long time. 

• He models how to deal with shock and anger by restoring his own self control, 

• he reaches out in practical ways, (cocoa, sleep)

• He asks simple questions (age, what she knows)

• he gives thoughtful explanations (minus “ta-ta-ta-dah”) 

• all without letting himself be put down, pushed around (he’d already done all his withering) or being soppy (an unforgivable crime in Susan’s book).

Despite the fact that they have an argument the next day, the job is done. Albert has been everything Susan needed at that moment in a way that the rat and the raven weren’t able to be. 

Finally, at last, DEATH, her grandfather is there for her when push comes to shove. I love their final scene together on the lift home scene, and then DEATH watching over her on his model Discworld as she has her quiet weep alone in her bed, knowing that she’d had to make a really hard choice about her life orientation - human or immortal. She’d wanted to save her parents but in the end made the same choice as they did - humanity… until the next time Binky and the Death of Rats come for her.