I Read Books: Unseen Acaemicals
Unseen Academicals
It’s football season in Ankh-Morpork. As ever when things in the Discworld happen they happen quickly, and with a push from the Patrician, the fortuitous discovery of an ancient football artefact and rules, and the greed of the wizards* it moves quickly from crowds-of-people-shoving-down-streets to basically modern footie.
This gets into the workings of the Unseen University for the first time in a while. The Bursar has been sidelined and the Dean has been hired away for another university (to the Archchancellor’s fury). Ponder Stibbons, the Lecturer in Recent Runes, has taken on all the jobs that need doing. The Head Of Post-Mortem Studies makes a reappearance from Making Money, and his role is expanded on; by statute he does the evil wizarding that is necessary to make the university work. Also the Cabinet of Curiousities from that novel is the source of new balls.
Perhaps more interestingly is the below stairs part of the University. That the University is not just wizards goes back to Equal Rites (whose events continue to be ignored by the novel series, in part because Pratchett had more interesting things to say on the themes and topics elsewhere). Here we discover two of the kitchen staff (especially the Night Kitchen that makes snacks for after dark, especially pies) and two of the candle dribblers (wizards can’t work with fresh candles, they need to be well dribbled). One of the candle dribblers in Mr Nutt, an orc, as part of an experiment to rehabilitate orcs from their terrible reputation. Another is Trevor Likely, a football supporter, who falls in love with one of the cooks, who supports another team.
She finds herself caught up in a fashion sub-plot in which dwarves are launching micro-mail, which doesn’t chafe. All of this weaves together in a somewhat complex way, yet comes together satisfactorily. The dwarves involved in the fashion are outliers, but with the success the money and the micro-mail gets them back into society, on their own terms.
Which is a recurring theme. There are divisions, between upstairs and downstairs at the university for example, levelled by the football. But also other divisions, between football teams (Dolly Sisters vs Dimwall), between colleges (Unseen University and Brazeneck College), and orcs vs everyone else. When really they ought to have more in common?
Read This: A lot of fun stuff if you like a bit of football,
and good jokes even if you don’t
Don’t Read This: Many characters are well established; it’s
not a good jumping on point
* One of the university endowments requires that they field a football team, and without it their enormous meals would become slightly less enormous