Fantasy Tropes in Soul Music
Fantasy Tropes
1 Thought ExperimentsThought experiments are the bread and butter of fantasy and science fiction. They are a hallmark of Terry Pratchetts’s writing style. Starting with a “what if'' and running with it. There are plenty in Soul Music.
a) In creating the character of Death Terry Pratchett has already set us up with one. What might an anthropomorphic personification look and behave like? What if he became influenced by the very people he was, in a sense, serving? In Soul Music he presents us with another. What if a human child should discover that they were related to him and had inherited his role?
In our cultural context this is not as fantastical an idea as it sounds. In the most common faith in Western culture the in-person appearance of the son of God is a key tenet. Christianity is a belief system based on the belief that this father from another dimension sent a representative or part of himself in human form. I don’t believe Terry Pratchett was in any way saying that Susan or DEATH or anyone else was directly a representation of Christ, he was just doing a logical, philosophical and fun exploration of what the common idea “incarnation” (Latin for ‘in flesh’) could look like. Abstract philosophy is all very well, but most of us need solid hooks for our minds to land an idea. Pratchett has Susan working through the idea using the concrete images that we need.
“Death,” said Susan, flatly. “Like the Hogfather and the Sandman and the Tooth Fairy?”
He lampshades the idea so that we know what he’s doing :
Look, Albert,” said Susan, in the voice one uses to the simple-minded, “even if there was a ‘Death’ like that, and frankly it’s quite ridiculous to go anthropomorphizing a simple natural function….”
- then does it anyway.
no-one can inherit anything from it …
But we’re in the know, we know she already has.
“They was afraid it was going to happen and it has! You’ve inherited.”
Follows the explanation so our brains are on board :
“No one had taught Susan about the power of belief, or at least about the power of belief in a combination of high magical potential and low reality stability such as existed on the Discworld. Belief makes a hollow place. Something has to roll in to fill it.”
Behold, it becomes logical.
We’re drawn in.
We suspend belief and believe!
b) Another anthropomorphic personification is equally obvious. We say some pretty grandiose things about music.
“Music is life itself.” – Louis Armstrong
“Music, once admitted to the soul, becomes a sort of spirit, and never dies.” Edward Bulwar Lytton
“Without music, life would be a mistake.” Friedrich Nietzsche
So what if music was Music and might accidentally overhear the rash words of Imp.
He’d said, “You don’t know anything! You’re just a stupid old man! But I’m giving my life to music! One day soon everyone will say I was the greatest musician in the world!”
Stupid words. … And, if they’re said with the right passion and the gods are feeling bored, sometimes the universe will re-form itself around words like that. Words have always had the power to change the world.
Be careful what you wish for. You never know who will be listening.
Or what, for that matter.
Terry Pratchett takes us to a place where they become true -
“Music is my life” (Buddy)
“I can't stop, show business is in me soul”, (Asphalt)
And just for balance because there have to be threes :
“Without duty what am I?” (Death)
and as an ending, as we haven't already got the point, shows us just how pompous it can sound.
“Somewhere, in some other world far away from the Discworld, someone tentatively picked up a musical instrument that echoed to the rhythm in their soul.
It will never die.
It’s here to stay.”
Then we’re then set up for the first premise to have to combat the second.
c) There are plenty more. Another is playing with our idea of size. DEATH’s “cottage” is the obvious one, but it’s reflected in how he portrays people and this taking us beyond the realms of tickling our thought buttons into challenges our perceptions :
“Because the fact was that although in actual size Foul Ole Ron was a small hunched man in a huge grubby overcoat, in smell he filled the world.”
“Death was seven feet tall. He looked taller.”
“And Susan realised that the woman was actually quite short. She had a tall bearing and a tall voice and a tall manner, and was tall in every respect except height. Amazingly, she’d apparently been able to keep this a secret from people.”
He wasn’t a small man, Susan realised. He was quite tall, but he walked with the kind of lopsided stoop normally associated with laboratory assistants of an Igor turn of mind.
2 Time Travel
Terry Pratchett gives us the wonderful fiddly word puzzles with the text to work out who was where when and set up the premise from the beginning - if you look for it.
-“ THERE IS WHAT IS, AND WHAT WILL BE.!”
- He is my grandfather. Will be, anyway. Is. Was.
-She knew who was in the coach. But it had already happened. There was nothing she could do to stop it, because if she’d stopped it, it wouldn’t have happened. And she was here watching it happen. So she hadn’t. So it had. She felt the logic of the situation dropping into place like a series of huge leaden slabs.
Thematic repetition of time words:
-“But I haven’t got time,” Susan wailed. “Oh, time,” said the raven. “Time’s mainly habit. Time is not a particular feature of things for you.”
-“Humans have to put up with Time, but days are a sort of personal option.”
-“but Time in Death’s house was a reusable resource.”
-“Time was something that happened to other people, wasn’t it?”
-“FOR US, TIME IS ONLY A PLACE. IT’S ALL SPREAD OUT. ”
And brain tingling concepts :
“Hang on! I can’t—”
Susan looked at the wood. She could. Of course she could. More memories crystallised in front of her eyes. After all, it was only wood. It’d rot in a few hundred years. By the measure of infinity, it hardly existed at all. On average, considered over the lifetime of the multiverse, most things didn’t.
She stepped forward. The heavy oak door offered as much resistance as a shadow.”
3 World Creation
Soul Music would be counted as a fantasy rather than a fairytale. It is hard to find a clear definition, perhaps because the lines are blurred. Ashlee Willis gives a very helpful and cautiously qualified definition : “Fairytales happen locally… A princess may taste a poison apple and fall into an enchanted sleep, but her sleep does not affect any but herself and the one who enchanted her…Fantasies …tend to deal with sagas. Frodo has to destroy the ring … to save the lives of every person and creature living in Middle Earth. Although fairytales mostly happen “far away” or “long ago,” they seem to take place mainly within our own world. They don’t require such extensive world-building as fantasy authors employ to create their stories.”
I don’t intend to examine this much further as it is so obvious and very well covered elsewhere. Even Terry Pratchett seems to have thought so as it is one of his few metaphysical highly fantastical books that does not contain a stylistically-traditional Pratchettian-poetic-prologue-introduction to Discworld. Or maybe he was deliberately trying to get his Discworld initiation past the critics of the prologue by neatly integrating it into the text, subtly but regularly reminding us to keep in perspective where we are.
The first paragraph Includes these 3 vital pieces of information to orientate us (my highlights) :
This is a story about memory. And this much can be remembered…
…that the Death of the Discworld, for reasons of his own, once rescued a baby girl and took her to his home between the dimensions. He let her grow to become sixteen because he believed that older children were easier to deal with than younger children, and this shows that you can be an immortal anthropomorphic personification and still get things, as it were, dead wrong…
We get the description of the Discworld as an ornament in DEATH’s study :
There was a large, heavy-looking desk on a raised dais, with a leather swivel chair behind it. There was a large model of the Discworld, on a sort of ornament made of four elephants standing on the shell of a turtle.
Reminders combined with world building information and tie ins to the book’s themes :
“Death stood up and strode across to the model of the Discworld.
MORPHIC RESONANCE, he said, not looking at Susan. DAMN. PEOPLE DON’T BEGIN TO UNDERSTAND IT. SOUL HARMONICS. IT’S RESPONSIBLE FOR SO MANY THINGS.”
“No one had taught Susan about the power of belief, or at least about the power of belief in a combination of high magical potential and low reality stability such as existed on the Discworld.
Belief makes a hollow place. Something has to roll in to fill it.
Which is not to say that belief denies logic. For example, it’s fairly obvious that the Sandman needs only a small sack.
On the Discworld, he doesn’t bother to take the sand out first.”
“Death smiled and pushed aside the magnifying lens and turned away from the Discworld to find Albert watching him.”
And in the final paragraph :
“Somewhere, in some other world far away from the Discworld, someone tentatively picked up a musical instrument that echoed to the rhythm in their soul.”
That’s some fancy literary world-building footwork.
4 Memory
“I REMEMBER EVERYTHING.”
Memory is a theme explored in many ways by Terry Pratchett through the book. He states this as a purpose in the first line :
“This is a story about memory. And this much can be remembered…”
In a beautiful, incremental sequence of images across a number of passages Terry Pratchett contrasts DEATH, plagued by these memory intrusions, his desperate need to forget, with Susan’s gradual return of memory, from creeping to flooding :
“feeling…no, she realised…the memory was creeping over her from somewhere that this one was not only real but on her side.”
“Images rose from the mud at the bottom of her mind.”
“The hippo of recollection stirred in the muddy waters of the mind.”
“The hippo of memory wallowed…”
“Susan sat while memories woke and yawned and unfolded in her head.
“I remember about that bathroom now,” she said. “It’s all coming back to me.”
“Nah, it never went away. It just got papered over.”
“She stood and stared at it as memory flooded back.”
“YOU’VE ALWAYS KNOWN. YOU REMEMBER EVERYTHING. SO DO I. BUT YOU ARE HUMAN AND YOUR MIND REBELS FOR YOUR OWN SAKE. SOMETHING GETS ACROSS, THOUGH. DREAMS, PERHAPS. PREMONITIONS. FEELINGS. SOME SHADOWS ARE SO LONG THEY ARRIVE BEFORE THE LIGHT.”
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