Unseen Academicals
Nov. 13th, 2009 10:44 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kindkitYesterday I proved my theory that the only way not to spend money is not to leave the house. I went out for non-book-buying purposes and nevertheless came back with a copy of Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals. I'd been resisting so nobly, and waiting for it to become available at my library! But I was 52nd in the library's queue, which has not moved at all in two weeks, and my patience finally surrendered to the urge to read it now.
So. Bought it, read it. It made me sad.
There are two reasons for that. First, the book has a very elegiac feel. It's likely to be the last adult Discworld novel Pratchett will write, as I'm sure he himself knows, and throughout, there was a sense of goodbye. Although the book focuses on new characters, some characters from previous books came back for cameos that didn't have any function in the plot (e.g. Sam Vimes, William de Worde, Sergeant Angua, C. M. O. T. Dibbler) and many more were name-dropped. It felt like Pratchett didn't want to leave anyone out if he could possibly help it.
The other reason I felt sad is that the book just isn't very good. It's all rather stale, with a dull and weakly developed plot, and it didn't hold my interest as a reader--I skimmed quite a bit, which I seldom do when reading Pratchett. It doesn't help that football, like all sports, means less than nothing to me; on the other hand, I'm not very interested in currency and the gold standard, either, but I like Making Money a lot, because (a) unlike Unseen Academicals, it doesn't drown me in details, and (b) I care about the characters. Moist von Lipwig, schemer and con artist, is vivid and fascinating; almost everybody in UA feels flat. This is true even of established characters (when Ponder Stibbons talks just like Vetinari, something's gone horribly wrong). As for the new characters, I was mostly indifferent. I never cared about Juliet and Trev and often actively disliked them; it was hard to care about Nutt because he was too perfect (not only was there no suspense about whether his orc nature might overwhelmed him, he didn't even seem to have ordinary, everyday flaws); I really liked Glenda for about half the book and then she mostly lost her own story, becoming just a secondary part of Nutt's (both mothering him and providing a handy romantic partner).
I did like Pepe and Madam Sharn in many ways. With Madam Sharn, Pratchett does one of the things I hoped he'd do--he gives us a dwarf character who is (it's implied) biologically male but who embraces a female gender presentation. That slightly makes up for the startling gender essentialism of Thud and other parts of UA, in which, for example, all female dwarfs love babies and makeup. And Pepe is pretty damn awesome--a gay man (it's implied) who can be a fabulous fashionista or a tough, cynical bastard as it suits him, and who has converted to dwarf culture out of disgust with the prejudices of human culture and love for Madam Sharn. Their relationship, although we don't see much of it, is still one of the more convincing romantic relationships in the Discworld novels. And yet, I have some qualms. It bothers me that the two same-sex relationships we've seen in the thirty-some Discworld novels both involve gender variance and both (if I'm not misremembering Monstrous Regiment) have a kind of implied heteronormativity in which one partner is "really the man" and one is "really the woman." Not only is this stereotyped, but the way Pratchett develops it doesn't even always make sense. Why, for instance, should Bengo Macarona, who is definitely gay, be attracted to Madam Sharn, who presents as female?
I was also rather thrown by Pepe's attack on Andy Shank at the end of the book. I'd believe Pepe getting as brutal as necessary to protect himself or someone else from Shank's bullying, but an unprovoked attack was hard to swallow both on the level of characterization and the level of "wait, did my favorite character in this book just cut someone's eye out?". Like a lot of the gay-related content in this book, it felt like Pratchett was trying too hard to be sympathetic and progressive. Pepe's speech about Why Bullying Is Wrong has its counterpart in Ridcully's comment after learning that Bengo Macarona is gay: "In my opinion there's not enough love in the world." I have no doubt that this is Pratchett's opinion, and I applaud him for it, but I don't believe for a second that it's Ridcully's. Pratchett doesn't seem to trust the reader to get the point without PSAs and authorial handholding.
Perhaps UA's biggest failing is that it's sentimental. The apotheosis of Juliet as the goddess of football? Really???? Juliet and Trev floating above the crowd kissing? The immediate acceptance of Nutt by the entire city (except for the wicked Andy Shank)? Pratchett does sometimes subvert the warm glow (I especially liked his perceptive remarks about the limits of working-class tolerance of the "we accept anybody so long as they mind their own business" sort, and its underside as the crab bucket that you're not allowed to climb out of), but not enough for my taste. I certainly don't require tragedy or pure irony, but much of UA is unbelievably, and at times sickeningly, sweet. I'm sure this is not unrelated to its elegiac quality, but when I think about that I just get sadder.
The book doesn't do the one thing I had feared it might: feature a Vetinari/Margolotta romance. People had been reassuring me on this score, but I remained in some doubt until actually reading it. Margolotta's hardly even there, and their relationship barely reads as friendship, let alone love. I'm fond of the bit when Vetinari and Marglotta have dinner at opposite ends of a long table, which is not a signifier of romance, and I wonder if it's a deliberate callback to the moment in Making Money when Moist and Spike Dearheart, who really are in love, sit together at one end of a long table rather than at opposite ends. It makes sense that, previous to UA, the main sign of Vetinari and Margolotta's friendship was playing Thud via clacks--competition and distance. Margolotta is the leader of a foreign power, and she seems to have adopted Vetinari's ruthlessness but not his good judgment or the selflessness that makes him a benevolent tyrant. The scene with Nutt at the end, when she starts tapping her foot in frustration at Nutt not immediately acknowledging/paying his respects to her, says a lot about what kind of leader she is. I'm not sure she has much of Vetinari's respect, let alone his affection.
Vetinari, like all the recurring characters, feels off to me for much of UA (he calls Ridcully by his first name, and that's before he gets drunk!), but he does have some moments of awesome. And his deep dark pessimism isn't subsumed in the book's general sentimentality, although he does seem to have a little more faith in people's potential than he used to. I quite loved the whole story about the otters and the salmon, but especially the ending: "If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior." This doesn't entirely make sense (the Discworld is full of supreme beings, and moral superiority over most of them wouldn't be a great challenge) but it still feels like Vetinari, which is the key thing in my opinion.
I'm no happier about the Drumknott-related stuff than I was before when reading it out of context, but in various discussions with various folks, I think I've managed to explain away most of it. It really is believable that the "would you kick a ball" discussion is Drumknott's way of gently chiding Vetinari for being so incautious; he spends rather a lot of the book gently chiding, poor man. Vetinari getting drunk seems, unsurprisingly, to have freaked him out. Drumknott's immediate dislike of Glenda Sugarbean is hard to explain except as jealousy (with, I think, a certain amount of displaced irritation at Vetinari's odd behavior and, perhaps, the presence of Margolotta, to whom he can't show his disapproval); since I ship Vetinari/Drumknott, I find this sweet. But it's not a patch on the banter and clear affection between them in Going Postal and Making Money. (I recognize that they simply weren't in UA as much as in GP and MM, and I also recognize that Pratchett isn't necessarily going to focus on my favorite characters in every book. But that doesn't excuse inconsistent characterization, and going from their intense closeness at the end of MM, where they talk like Drumknott is practically co-ruling the city with Vetinari, to Vetinari making fun of Drumknott's supposed stationery obsession is hugely inconsistent. At least, it is if one believes that Vetinari really means it--I've chosen to believe that he's got his reasons for making Margolotta believe that he doesn't think much of Drumknott.)
Okay, that kind of meandered off into my personal obsessions a bit, but, well, I read as myself. As a fan and a fanwriter, as someone who feels a particular stake in certain characters, and as someone who's hyperattentive to the development of characters and their relationships from book to book. (And not just Vetinari and Drumknott--I've posted elsewhere about my discontent with Sam Vimes's characterization in Thud. And Sybil's too.)
I wish I liked Unseen Academicals better, because, as I said at the start of this post, there's not likely to be another Discworld novel. (Apparently there's a Tiffany Aching book scheduled, but I don't count the Young Adult stuff.) I only got fannish about Discworld a couple of months ago, and my sadness doesn't compare to that of long-term fans. But after finishing UA at about three o'clock this morning, I had to go and re-read some of Guards! Guards! to cheer myself up.
*****
So. Bought it, read it. It made me sad.
There are two reasons for that. First, the book has a very elegiac feel. It's likely to be the last adult Discworld novel Pratchett will write, as I'm sure he himself knows, and throughout, there was a sense of goodbye. Although the book focuses on new characters, some characters from previous books came back for cameos that didn't have any function in the plot (e.g. Sam Vimes, William de Worde, Sergeant Angua, C. M. O. T. Dibbler) and many more were name-dropped. It felt like Pratchett didn't want to leave anyone out if he could possibly help it.
The other reason I felt sad is that the book just isn't very good. It's all rather stale, with a dull and weakly developed plot, and it didn't hold my interest as a reader--I skimmed quite a bit, which I seldom do when reading Pratchett. It doesn't help that football, like all sports, means less than nothing to me; on the other hand, I'm not very interested in currency and the gold standard, either, but I like Making Money a lot, because (a) unlike Unseen Academicals, it doesn't drown me in details, and (b) I care about the characters. Moist von Lipwig, schemer and con artist, is vivid and fascinating; almost everybody in UA feels flat. This is true even of established characters (when Ponder Stibbons talks just like Vetinari, something's gone horribly wrong). As for the new characters, I was mostly indifferent. I never cared about Juliet and Trev and often actively disliked them; it was hard to care about Nutt because he was too perfect (not only was there no suspense about whether his orc nature might overwhelmed him, he didn't even seem to have ordinary, everyday flaws); I really liked Glenda for about half the book and then she mostly lost her own story, becoming just a secondary part of Nutt's (both mothering him and providing a handy romantic partner).
I did like Pepe and Madam Sharn in many ways. With Madam Sharn, Pratchett does one of the things I hoped he'd do--he gives us a dwarf character who is (it's implied) biologically male but who embraces a female gender presentation. That slightly makes up for the startling gender essentialism of Thud and other parts of UA, in which, for example, all female dwarfs love babies and makeup. And Pepe is pretty damn awesome--a gay man (it's implied) who can be a fabulous fashionista or a tough, cynical bastard as it suits him, and who has converted to dwarf culture out of disgust with the prejudices of human culture and love for Madam Sharn. Their relationship, although we don't see much of it, is still one of the more convincing romantic relationships in the Discworld novels. And yet, I have some qualms. It bothers me that the two same-sex relationships we've seen in the thirty-some Discworld novels both involve gender variance and both (if I'm not misremembering Monstrous Regiment) have a kind of implied heteronormativity in which one partner is "really the man" and one is "really the woman." Not only is this stereotyped, but the way Pratchett develops it doesn't even always make sense. Why, for instance, should Bengo Macarona, who is definitely gay, be attracted to Madam Sharn, who presents as female?
I was also rather thrown by Pepe's attack on Andy Shank at the end of the book. I'd believe Pepe getting as brutal as necessary to protect himself or someone else from Shank's bullying, but an unprovoked attack was hard to swallow both on the level of characterization and the level of "wait, did my favorite character in this book just cut someone's eye out?". Like a lot of the gay-related content in this book, it felt like Pratchett was trying too hard to be sympathetic and progressive. Pepe's speech about Why Bullying Is Wrong has its counterpart in Ridcully's comment after learning that Bengo Macarona is gay: "In my opinion there's not enough love in the world." I have no doubt that this is Pratchett's opinion, and I applaud him for it, but I don't believe for a second that it's Ridcully's. Pratchett doesn't seem to trust the reader to get the point without PSAs and authorial handholding.
Perhaps UA's biggest failing is that it's sentimental. The apotheosis of Juliet as the goddess of football? Really???? Juliet and Trev floating above the crowd kissing? The immediate acceptance of Nutt by the entire city (except for the wicked Andy Shank)? Pratchett does sometimes subvert the warm glow (I especially liked his perceptive remarks about the limits of working-class tolerance of the "we accept anybody so long as they mind their own business" sort, and its underside as the crab bucket that you're not allowed to climb out of), but not enough for my taste. I certainly don't require tragedy or pure irony, but much of UA is unbelievably, and at times sickeningly, sweet. I'm sure this is not unrelated to its elegiac quality, but when I think about that I just get sadder.
The book doesn't do the one thing I had feared it might: feature a Vetinari/Margolotta romance. People had been reassuring me on this score, but I remained in some doubt until actually reading it. Margolotta's hardly even there, and their relationship barely reads as friendship, let alone love. I'm fond of the bit when Vetinari and Marglotta have dinner at opposite ends of a long table, which is not a signifier of romance, and I wonder if it's a deliberate callback to the moment in Making Money when Moist and Spike Dearheart, who really are in love, sit together at one end of a long table rather than at opposite ends. It makes sense that, previous to UA, the main sign of Vetinari and Margolotta's friendship was playing Thud via clacks--competition and distance. Margolotta is the leader of a foreign power, and she seems to have adopted Vetinari's ruthlessness but not his good judgment or the selflessness that makes him a benevolent tyrant. The scene with Nutt at the end, when she starts tapping her foot in frustration at Nutt not immediately acknowledging/paying his respects to her, says a lot about what kind of leader she is. I'm not sure she has much of Vetinari's respect, let alone his affection.
Vetinari, like all the recurring characters, feels off to me for much of UA (he calls Ridcully by his first name, and that's before he gets drunk!), but he does have some moments of awesome. And his deep dark pessimism isn't subsumed in the book's general sentimentality, although he does seem to have a little more faith in people's potential than he used to. I quite loved the whole story about the otters and the salmon, but especially the ending: "If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior." This doesn't entirely make sense (the Discworld is full of supreme beings, and moral superiority over most of them wouldn't be a great challenge) but it still feels like Vetinari, which is the key thing in my opinion.
I'm no happier about the Drumknott-related stuff than I was before when reading it out of context, but in various discussions with various folks, I think I've managed to explain away most of it. It really is believable that the "would you kick a ball" discussion is Drumknott's way of gently chiding Vetinari for being so incautious; he spends rather a lot of the book gently chiding, poor man. Vetinari getting drunk seems, unsurprisingly, to have freaked him out. Drumknott's immediate dislike of Glenda Sugarbean is hard to explain except as jealousy (with, I think, a certain amount of displaced irritation at Vetinari's odd behavior and, perhaps, the presence of Margolotta, to whom he can't show his disapproval); since I ship Vetinari/Drumknott, I find this sweet. But it's not a patch on the banter and clear affection between them in Going Postal and Making Money. (I recognize that they simply weren't in UA as much as in GP and MM, and I also recognize that Pratchett isn't necessarily going to focus on my favorite characters in every book. But that doesn't excuse inconsistent characterization, and going from their intense closeness at the end of MM, where they talk like Drumknott is practically co-ruling the city with Vetinari, to Vetinari making fun of Drumknott's supposed stationery obsession is hugely inconsistent. At least, it is if one believes that Vetinari really means it--I've chosen to believe that he's got his reasons for making Margolotta believe that he doesn't think much of Drumknott.)
Okay, that kind of meandered off into my personal obsessions a bit, but, well, I read as myself. As a fan and a fanwriter, as someone who feels a particular stake in certain characters, and as someone who's hyperattentive to the development of characters and their relationships from book to book. (And not just Vetinari and Drumknott--I've posted elsewhere about my discontent with Sam Vimes's characterization in Thud. And Sybil's too.)
I wish I liked Unseen Academicals better, because, as I said at the start of this post, there's not likely to be another Discworld novel. (Apparently there's a Tiffany Aching book scheduled, but I don't count the Young Adult stuff.) I only got fannish about Discworld a couple of months ago, and my sadness doesn't compare to that of long-term fans. But after finishing UA at about three o'clock this morning, I had to go and re-read some of Guards! Guards! to cheer myself up.
*****
