Unseen Academicals, by Terry Pratchett (with added commentary from a lone Arsenal supporter)
Originally published at tansyrr.com. You can comment here or there.
It happened again this week. I have lovely, understanding and supportive friends & family, but I have one hobby that many of them ( jumbled_words and zeft aside) just can’t wrap their heads around. Arsenal. Football. I not only follow a team and show every appearance of understanding what goes on both on and off the pitch, I am to all intents and purposes, obsessed with the game. Which is, for those of you completely lost at this point, a sport.
Me being interested in sport goes completely against every version of myself that people may have met prior to about October 2008 and thus it is a hard thing for them to cope with. My Dad tends to produce a quiet, stunned silence every time he is reminded of this bewildering fact. Occasionally he is roused to recall why it is that everyone he knew supported Manchester United in the 1970’s (in a vague “if I have to pick a team” kind of way), and I have come to the conclusion that he says this because it is the only football anecdote that he knows. I have tried to explain how deeply insulting it is that he might think I would be willing to change allegiances at this point, but it hasn’t sunk in, not even after the second time I gave him the “diving ballerina” speech about Cristiano Ronaldo that is now tragically out of date. I need to work up a new one about how often Wayne Rooney cheats… None of these speeches are any use to my mother, who just smiles brightly as if I’m discussing an embarrassing medical complaint and changes the subject. (they both raised me with a fervent dislike of team sports.)
[my honey's reaction to all this was the best, which was to choose the highest-ranked team which was a direct rival to my own and claiming to support it. If you can't beat me, join me!]
Anyway. Football. Now an intrinsic part of my soul, and something I pay attention to on a daily basis. Over the Christmas break, I have been asked at least twice by dear friends I love and respect why the football thing? Given that they’re not challenging my team choice but the entire issue, I do try my hardest. I talk about the narrative of football, about the highs and lows, about becoming invested in every member of a team, about the stresses of the transfer period (two days and counting), about the weirdness of removing one’s attachment and loyalty to a player once they, oh, get themselves transferred to another team and act like a dick the first time we play them, to the point of stamping on Robin Van Persie’s head…
Ahem, yes. Have you spotted the problem yet? It starts out all metaphors and similes and literate examples, and always descends into me ranting about the awesomeness of Cesc and Arshavin’s four goals in one game, and cute little Gibbs, and how the World Cup (along with the Olympics, the only kind of football/soccer that civilians understand) is a blight upon humanity because all our players go out to play for their countries and come back broken… and I see their eyes glaze over and that panicky ’shouldn’t she be talking about books or something’ look cross their face, and I pull back and start calmly talking about how cute the boys are when they cuddle after goals, and all is right with the world.
Explaining football to civilians is hard.
Which is my way of saying how brilliant Unseen Academicals by Terry Pratchett is, because he gets it. He gets football, and unsurprisingly has a longer and wiser grasp on it than I can possibly manage, with less than two seasons of supporting under my belt. More importantly, he is able to explain it in the language of story: in the Discworld, everything is about story, and the magic of football is expressed as usual through sly jokes and powerful characters and pithy phrases like “the thing about football is, it isn’t about football.”
Everything is in here. The violent past of the sport, the sense of belonging, the way that nobodies can be lifted into superstars (and the inevitable crunching consequences), the pies, the resistance to change, and the sense of destiny that, however ridiculous, can cross your mind when you are watching a particularly awesome game. The way that one player can sometimes change an entire game, not just because of who he is, but because of who his teammates think he is, and who the other team think he is, and who the people on the sideline in the stupid scarves and jumpers think he is. Pratchett does to football in Unseen Academicals what he has already done with Hollywood, Egyptian history, the post office, the Royal Mint, palace guards, witchcraft, tyrants, universities, Death, war, fairy tales, faerie lore, opera, Shakespeare and many more topics and themes: he takes his subject, turns it inside out, and writes a book that is so very immersed in that theme that, for a while at least, it seems as if no one need ever write a book on that theme again.
He takes the mundane, and makes it epic. No one else does what Terry Pratchett does with books. No one else writes like him. Whether you love, hate, or are indifferent to his style, you can’t deny how unique he is as a writer.
There were many things I liked about Unseen Academicals, which is officially a Good Discworld Book, and may also be One of the Best In Years. There was the football aspect, which works in the way that all good sports stories should, resonating with those who know what he’s talking about, and translating effortlessly to those who don’t. The wizards actually develop plot-wise, with Archchancellor Ridcully having to deal with his friend the Dean abandoning Unseen University to become an Archchancellor in his own right, and Ponder Stibbons finally (possibly) beginning to burst at the seams with the number of responsibilities put on his shoulders. We even see a new side to Vetinari (not very different to the old side, but still…) There are cameos from old favourites, and the Pratchett style in no way seems diminished from his new writing methods or his Alzheimers.
While my first reaction to one of the protagonists, sensible pie-maker Glenda, was that she was just another Agnes/Perdita and he was running out of female character types, I grew to love her and to respect that her similarities to a certain witch were only on the surface. I particularly enjoyed her friendship with Juliet, who also seemed to start out as one of those blank early Pratchett femmes (glamorous and empty-headed) but was likewise revealed to have depths beyond being the archetypal WAG in the story. Did I mention these two had a friendship? Of which more is revealed as the novel expands? Pratchett isn’t a stranger to female-female conversations (Angua and Cheery, the witches… okay, possibly that’s it) but I liked the depiction of these two young women in particular because I started out underestimating them, and their author, so badly.
Also you have to love a fantasy book which works so hard to not be about magic, even if magic is everywhere in that world, and which takes yet another traditional fantasy creature (yes there was still one left unpunctured) and explores its depths in new and interesting ways while yelling COME ON IF YOU THINK YOU’RE HARD ENOUGH very loudly.
If Discworld were to end here, it would be a fine note to end on, though I see no reason why it shouldn’t continue for years. That indefinable Pratchett magic is still going strong.