Sourcery Discworld

(Muse reads Discworld in release order part five)

I’m of two minds about this book. On the one hand, we have the return of the unwilling hero Rincewind, a character I didn’t realize that I’d missed a lot until he had a cameo in the previous book, once again overcoming all of his valid fears and misgivings in order to save the day at the last moment. A lot of the best things about this volume came at the end, where the book was able to tie together some of the thoughts it had floated earlier about identity, who you are versus who others perceive you or want you to be, and all of that touched on what has made me fall in love with this series so far.

On the other hand, there’s everything else about this book.

Unlike the previous four books I’ve read, I’m not sure why the side characters were here. They range from underdeveloped, one-note comedy asides (see: the genie), to ideas of characters who were on the fringe of being great, but never breaking free of the mold that the plot had set for them. In a story trying to say something about identity, this was sad to see. 

In some ways I understand why the book is like this—right now it’s clear that the series is still in an awkward phase, finding its footing outside of being a pure comedy fantasy—but when Conina had less of a character and role in the overall plot than her father Cohan did two novels ago, it’s hard to not be disappointed. I was a lot more understanding of this in the first two books, since there were heavy does of wordbuilding to go along with the silly tone. It didn’t matter that the characters were still figuring themselves out because the world of the Disc itself was still being explained into existence. But four books later, now with a good sense of “where” things are happening, I wish a bit more care was placed with “who” these things were happening to. 

So far, this series has figured out how to bring even the joke characters around to give them a role in the finale. For the first time that hasn’t happened, and I’m left wondering why all this time was spent with them. I would have rather spent the extra pages finding a point for the Luggage’s Looney Tunes adventures across the Disc since all the new characters ended up either wandering away or literally dismissed from the finale. I’m hopeful that some of these characters might come back in later volumes where they can actually come into their own as characters, but with the way things ends here, I’m not sure if they’ll be back at all.

This is also probably the reason why this book took me months to finish. Up until this point I’ve practically devoured the Discworld books, taken in by their blend of humor, satire, and genuine empathy and insight of the human condition. I didn’t feel that with this book until the very end, and I think that lack of direction for most of the cast was partially why it was hard for me to stick with this book. For a story that wanted to be about identity, I don’t think it knew what it wanted to be either, at least not until the very end.

None of this is to say that I suddenly hate the series—it’s just a bit of letdown after the highs of Mort. However, I do think that the series circled closer to what it really wants to be with the entry, even if it stumbled a bit more than the previous books. And even with all of that said, there’s some beautiful lines towards the end that make the whole read worth it. 

I do hope that the wizard comes back for his hat.

One of the interesting things I'm finding as I read the Discworld novels is how a throwaway joke one place gets expanded upon in a later novel. For example, the bit about the wizards' Unseen University being a lethal parody of academia that appeared in earlier books gets expanded in Sourcery to become one of the core conceits of the entire novel.

The problem with this is that sometimes those throw away jokes don't really stand up to closer examination, and this was one of them. Unseen University simply doesn't work very well. Why would anyone actually want to join it? Why would wizards keep training new wizards if they're simply going to try to kill them?

Yes, I'm thinking about it too hard, but that's the point. The absurdity, when examined in more detail, drew me out of the story instead of making me chuckle and move on.

Still, once I got past that, the book was probably the most entertaining of the Rincewind books I've read so far. The only thing that kept it from getting a fourth star was the bit about Unseen University that I just finished discussing. The rest of it, especially the new supporting characters, was quite good.