Soul Music

(Discworld Novel 16)

By: Terry Pratchett

Narrated by: Tony Robinson

'Be careful what you wish for. You never know who might be listening.'

There's no getting away from it. From whichever angle, Death is a horrible, inescapable business. But someone's got to do it. So if Death decides to take a well-earned moment to uncover the meaning of life and discover himself in the process, then there is going to be a void of specific dimensions that needs to be occupied, particularly so when there is trouble brewing in Discworld. There aren't too many who are qualified to fill Death's footsteps and it certainly doesn't help the imminent cataclysm that the one person poised between the mortal and the immortal is only sixteen years old...

Critic reviews

'Pratchett lures classical themes and popular mythologies into the dark corners of his imagination, gets them drunk and makes them do things you wouldn't dream of doing with an Oxford don'

'Very clever madcap satire which has universal appeal. If you haven't tried him, this is a fun one to start with'

'The great Terry Pratchett, whose wit is metaphysical, who creates an energetic and lively secondary world, who has a multifarious genius for strong parody ... who deals with death with startling originality. Who writes amazing sentences' (A.S. Byatt)

'His spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction'

'Like Jonathan Swift, Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own, and like Swift he is a satirist of enormous talent ... incredibly funny ... compulsively readable'

'Classic English humour, with all the slapstick, twists and dry observations you could hope for'

Love it

Well read and a great story. Tony Robinson is a fantastic reader and he draws you into the narrative so well. Terry Pratchett of course is unbeatable

The big bang was a rock chord

Wow. Pratchett is always wonderful but this novel to me is a touch stone of Pratchetts writing leveling up into an even better novelist. This story though short, is an incredible piece of meta cognition about our understanding of worlds and their concepts existence.

disappointing

What could have made this a 4 or 5-star listening experience for you?

I did not realize this was the abridged version. I love Terry Pratchett, but his plots are so intricate and weave in so many characters that the 3 hour condensed version just jumped around all over. It was really difficult to follow.

Has Soul Music turned you off from other books in this genre?

I love listening to Terry Pratchett books, but I won't buy another abridged version!

Have you listened to any of Tony Robinson’s other performances before? How does this one compare?

Tony Robinson himself is not the issue. He is a marvellous reader.

If you could play editor, what scene or scenes would you have cut from Soul Music?

The opposite. I would not have cut any. That was the whole problem.

Any additional comments?

I wish I could get a refund!

Weak story and so poorly narrated

I LOVE Terry Pratchett books, I know every one very well. I also love the audiobooks, I must have listened each for 20+ times. That said, Soul Music is quite a weak story to begin with, generally agreed to be one of Terry’s most unremarkable books. But you can do a lot with good audiobook story telling and I am APALLED how bad this audiobook is.

If you have ever listened to classic Terry’s audiobooks narrated by Nigel Planer and Stephen Briggs, then you know how masterful narrating can be. You will hear first hand how it should be done and how best to convey variety of voices and different characters. It’s not just modulating amount whine in your voice or going horse as Tony Robinson is doing.
For example, he managed to turn the character of Death, who is loved by fans everywhere into a weirdo who talks like he enjoys killing and gets creepy pleasure out of it. Like a neighbourhood perv who is extremely suspicious.

I could go on and on, but in the nutshell it is the worse narration I have ever heard. It is unpleasant listen because the voice is nasal and whiny and the narrators ability to produce voices that would be distinctive but sound natural by playing around with pitch, speed, accents etc is clearly limited. So a lot of characters have cartoon voices which makes the whole thing a farce. Please, skip Tony Robinson abridged audiobooks and start with Nigel Planer’s or Stephen Briggs’s unabridged versions, otherwise you might stop listening to wonderful creation of Terry Pratchett after the first book already.

2 versions both full credits?

This is apparently not the full book. According to Amazon the actual book is 11 hours long and this one is only 3! The narrator is also horrible with the voice of Death. This is the 2nd time I’m charged a full credit for less than half the book! I’m so angry finding this out. How could they let this happen?!?! Now I have to pay ANOTHER CTEDIT to get the actual book! This is ridiculous