Unseen Academicals (Discworld, #37)

Unseen Academicals
by Terry Pratchett
Rating: ★★★★
isbn: 9780385609340
Series: Discworld #37
Publication Date: January 1, 2009
Pages: 400
Genre: Fantasy
Publisher: Doubleday

Football has come to the ancient city of Ankh-Morpork. And now, the wizards of Unseen University must win a football match, without using magic, so they're in the mood for trying everything else. This is not going to be a gentleman's game.

The prospect of the Big Match draws in a street urchin with a wonderful talent for kicking a tin can, a maker of jolly good pies, a dim but beautiful young woman, who might just turn out to be the greatest fashion model there has ever been, and the mysterious Mr Nutt (and no one knows anything much about Mr Nutt, not even Mr Nutt). As the match approaches, four lives are entangled and changed for ever. Because the thing about football - the important thing about football - is that it is not just about football. Here we go! Here we go! Here we go!

Every time I start reading a Pratchett, I always ask myself why?  Then I get 20 pages or so in, and ahhh, yes, that’s why.  MT asked me what about his writing made the beginning such an obvious struggle when I end up laughing myself stupid through the rest, and I think – for this book at least – it’s because he starts with so many random bits.  I never quite know where he’s headed or what’s necessarily important, and it makes my brain ache.

But it’s generally worth the ache, as it was with this one.  Unseen Academicals, even though it’s about football, or foot-the-ball, as it’s known in Ankh Morpork, and soccer everywhere outside Europe and the UK, was possibly the … earthiest, in terms of humor and innuendo, of all the Pratchett’s I’ve read so far.  It was hilarious, and there were a few parts about the football that I had to read to MT.  Pratchett nails both the lunacy, and I suppose, the community of fanatical sports.

Underneath all that though, were rather endearing stories about 4 different people who start out only tangentially acquainted through work (although Glenda and Julia grew up together), but who come together to help the Unseen University build a football team, and consequently find their dreams.

This felt like a very sympathetic, dare I say, romantic?, Pratchett, and it was one of the few where I became invested in the characters’ outcomes.  Oddly, I’m not sure how I feel about Mr. Nutt’s resolution.  I think I’d have liked his ending more if Pratchett hadn’t turned him into a future hero.  Regardless, he was my favourite of the four.  The wizards got all the best lines, though.

When I started, I feared it was going to take me an age to finish, but once I got past the randomness and the story coalesced, I really did not want to put it down.

I read this for Halloween Bingo 2022’s Dark Academia square, as the book takes place entirely at the Unseen University.  It would also work for Gallows Humor, oddly enough, Monsters might work (Mr. Nutt’s potential), Spellbound, and Sword & Sorcery.