🎸 Soul Music by Terry Pratchett | Fantasy Analysis & Rock, Magic & Death

0:00Hello, and welcome back to The Deep Dive. Hello. I am so ready for this one because, frankly, the premise we're looking at today sounds like the start of a very, very strange joke. It really does, doesn't it? A skeleton, a schoolgirl, and a troll walk into a bar. Exactly, and you're just waiting for the punchline, but instead of a punchline, you get, well, you get the invention of rock and roll. And a cosmic being, having an existential crisis. Can't forget that. Right. We've got the stack of sources here, excerpts, analyses, all centering on one of my absolute favorite Terry Pratchett books, Soul Music. It's a classic. And it's a story where two completely different worlds just smash into each other. On one side, you have the ultimate cosmic constant death. The grim reaper himself. The anthropomorphic personification of the end of life. And he's tired. He's just done. So he decides to quit. Which is, I mean, that's terrifying. The implications of that are huge. It's catastrophic. But on the other side of the story, in the city of Ainkmore Park,

1:01something totally new is being born, a new kind of music. Yeah, something loud. Something with a beat. Something that, well, the people in the book, they don't really have a word for it yet. They just call it music with rocks in. I love that phrase so much. Music with rocks in. It's such a perfect primal description of early rock and roll. It's gritty, it's heavy. It's literally played by a troll hitting rocks together at one point. Right. So our mission today is to sort of unpack how these two threads connect. What on earth does the grim reaper have to do with, you know, the fantasy equivalent of an electric guitar? And we're going to get into some pretty big themes along the way. Things like memory, heredity, the nature of inspiration. Right. The big question in the book seems to be, is music something we create? Or is it something that just finds us, that catches us? Pratchett definitely leans into that second idea. That inspiration is a bit like a virus. It's infectious, and it needs a host.

2:02A virus, wow. Okay, well, let's start with the character who has to do with the immediate fallout of all this. Because if death goes missing, someone has to pick up the slack. Someone has to mine the shop. And that someone is a 16 year old school girl. Yes. The wonderful, the inimitable Susan Stohelet. Okay, tell me about Susan. Because looking through these excerpts, she seems like the absolute last person you'd expect to get tangled up in any kind of supernatural drama. She is, and that's what makes her so brilliant. She's a student at the Quorum College for young ladies. And you have to picture this place. It is the absolute pinnacle of a strict, proper boarding school. It's all about posture and etiquette. Sensible shoes. Lots of sensible shoes. I was looking at the curriculum that's mentioned, and it just cracked me up. They don't just teach math. They teach logic and paradox. And ironing. Can't forget ironing with moral applications. Logic and ironing. That feels like a whole life philosophy right there. But Susan isn't just a student. She's like the perfect student, isn't she?

3:02She buys into all of it. Oh, completely. She is hyper-logical. She's the kind of person who, if she saw a ghost, her first thought wouldn't be, I'm scared. It would be someone's left to window open. She refuses to engage with what she calls wooly thinking. Exactly. Pratchett writes her as someone who is aggressively almost violently normal. She wants the world to make sense. She needs it to fit into these neat little boxes. But her world just doesn't, there's a bit here about a tooth fairy, isn't there? Not the tooth fairy, but just a tooth fairy. A generic freelance tooth fairy, yes. Susan catches one in her dormitory. Now, most people, if they saw a tiny magical creature flying around, they'd be amazed or they'd scream. Susan, she just gets annoyed. She decides it's a stress-induced hallucination because logically, fairies aren't real. Therefore, it isn't there. She literally rationalizes it out of existence. That is some next-level denial. It's a very powerful coping mechanism, but there's more to it than just being stubborn.

4:02The text describes this very peculiar trait that Susan has. She has this ability to fade. Yes, I wanted to ask about this. Is she turning invisible? Is it like a magic spell? It's much more subtle than that. And honestly, it's way more interesting. Think about when you're in a crowd. Your brain doesn't process every single face, right? It just sees a crowd. Right, it's just background noise. Exactly. Susan has the ability to make herself part of that background noise, even if she's the only other person in the room. She doesn't become invisible. She just becomes uninteresting, inconspicuous. She makes herself boring on a conceptual level. That's a great way to put it. There's this fantastic scene where she's sitting right in front of her headmistress, warning him his butts. Miss butts, okay. And Susan just fades. And Miss butts completely forget she's there. She starts talking to herself, shuffling papers, wondering aloud where on earth that Susan girl has got to. I mean, that sounds incredibly useful for a 16-year-old. That's incredibly. But the book makes it very clear that this isn't a skill she learned.

5:04It's something she inherited. Okay, inherited from who? Because her parents are. Well, they're out of the picture, aren't they? They are. They died in a tragic carriage accident. But her grandfather. Her grandfather is death. Her grandfather is death. We have to pause on that. Her grandfather is the seven-foot tall skeleton with the side and the glowing blue eyes. Uh-huh. How does that work, biologically? Well, her mother, Isabelle, was adopted by death. So it's not a direct bloodline in that sense. But Pratchett plays this idea that heredity in the disc world isn't just about genes, it's about narrative, it's about function. Okay. She is death's granddaughter. That is her story. So she inherits his traits. And one of death's most important traits is that people don't really see him unless he wants them to. Because their brains just can't handle it. Exactly. The human brain just edits him out because the alternative, seeing a skeleton standing in the corner of the room, is just too traumatic to process. Susan is inherited that somehow I am not here field.

6:05So she's hiding out at school using her supernatural inherited powers to just be as normal as possible. But you can't hide from this kind of thing forever. No. And the call to adventure, as they say, it arrives in a way that Susan absolutely cannot ignore. Though she certainly tries. It arrives in the form of the death of rats. The death of rats. This might be my favorite character name in the whole series. It's literally a tiny skeleton rat. A tiny skeleton rat wearing a tiny black robe carrying a tiny little scythe. He's the grim reaper for rodents and other small creatures. That's amazing. And he doesn't speak. He just goes, streak in all caps. And he shows up in Susan's room with a raven. A raven named Quoth. Of course. I see what Pratchett did there, Quoth the raven. Never more. Except this raven absolutely refuses to say the N word, as he calls it. He thinks it's a cliche. A terrible cliche. He's a very cynical, world-weary raven. All he really wants is the e-dibles. Charming. So this bizarre duo appears in her bedroom.

7:07Yes. To deliver a very simple, very terrifying message. Her grandfather is gone. He's left. And someone needs to take over. And Susan's reaction is just no. She tries. She falls back on her logic. She tells them, this is obviously a dream. I eat too much cheese. I have a geography exam tomorrow. Magic isn't real. She literally tries to debate the skeletal rat. But then something starts to shift right the memories. This is where the book gets really interesting about how memory works. There's a metaphor in here about a hippo. Yes. The hippo of memory. You're going to need to unpack that for me. It's such a brilliant image. Pratchett writes that, for most people, memory is like a filing cabinet. It's orderly. You go in, you pull out a file, you look at it. But for Susan and for death memory is like a huge hippopotamus wallowing in a muddy river. Most of the time, the hippo is submerged. You can't see it. But it's always there. It's massive. It's ancient. It's heavy. And when it decides to surface, you cannot stop it. So she's not remembering things in the way we do.

8:08No, she's remembering things she has no right to know, things that haven't happened to her. She suddenly knows the layout of death's house. She remembers the black garden where nothing grows. She knows about his horse. These memories are rising out of the mud of her subconscious. Speaking of the horse, Binky. Binky. You expect the grim reaper to ride? I don't know, a skeletal nightmare with flaming hooves. Of course. But Binky is just a horse, a white horse. He is a very, very real horse. That's his defining quality. He's more real than almost anything else in the universe. Solid. He's dependable. And he flies. But the notes say he doesn't have wings or anything. No wings. Binky doesn't fly. He just treats the air as if it's another form of the ground. It's a matter of perspective. Totally. If Binky decides that a cloud is solid enough to stand on, then for him, it is. He just walks up this guy. And Susan just gets on. Instinctively. There's this wonderful scene where Binky just shows up at the school, standing in the garden. And Susan, who usually can't stand the horsey girls in her class, she just walks out, mounts

9:15this massive white stallion and rides him right over the school gates. And the other students, what do they see? Their brains can't process a flying horse. It's not logical. So they just think, wow, what an incredible jump. Look at that hang time. They rationalize the magic away. Just like Susan has been trying to do her whole life. But she's being pulled away from that world now. She's being pulled into her grandfathers. Okay. So while Susan is dealing with this very gothic, a very strange family drama, something completely different is brewing in the city. Yes. While Susan is dealing with silence and duty and the end of things, Uncle Morpork is getting loud. We have to talk about the band. This is the other half of the story. The collision course. It starts with a young man named Imp E. Celen. Imp E. Celen. Now, when I first read that name, I just thought, okay, typical fantasy name, a little bit Welsh sounding, but I have a feeling I'm missing something. This is Pratchett. There's always a pun. There's always a pun. And this is one of his absolute best. You're right. It is Welsh sounding.

10:15Imp comes from a place called Ymeidos. Which is Sodomall backwards. It is. A place full of rain and druids and sheep. It's very clearly a parody of whales. But if you translate his name, Imp means a small shoot or a little bud. And Celen is the Welsh word for the holly tree. But of holly. Buddy holly. No. No. Yes, wait. Pratchett is telling you right from the very beginning. This is the story of Buddy holly, or at least the disc world's version of it. That is incredible. A young musician full of dreams comes to the big city. And is destined for a tragic early end. The whole story is laid out in his name. I totally miss that. That's brilliant. So Buddy shows up in Ankh Morpork and he's not doing so well. No. He's broke. He's a bard. He plays the harp. But he got kicked out of his home after a fight with his dad about not playing the music properly. He wants to be famous. And he meets two other outcasts at the Musician's Guild. He does. He meets a dwarf and a troll. The classic rock and roll lineup.

11:16Pretty much. We have Glodson, the dwarf. He's a horn player. And like all dwarves in disc world, he's very practical, very cynical, and very, very interested in gold. And the name Glod is probably not an accident. Not at all. Say it with a dwarfish accent. It's gold. Of course it is. And the troll. The troll is Lyos Bluestone, though he later changes his name to Cliff. Cliff. Because he's a troll made of rock. He's a cliff. Exactly. And his musical contribution is, well, he bangs rocks together. Percussion. Very primal. So you've got harp, horn, and rocks. They go to the Musician's Guild looking for work. But there's a problem with the guild, isn't there? It sounds less like a helpful union and more like the mafia. Oh, it's absolutely a protection racket. It's run by this guy, Mr. Pleet. And Pleet is the ultimate bureaucrat. He doesn't care about music. He doesn't care about art. He cares if you've paid your annual license film. And the fees are ridiculous. Astronomical. There's a fee for everything. A fee for singing. A fee for playing. A fee for tapping your feet in time.

12:18So impen as new friends, they can't afford to play gigs legally. Which forces them to become rebels. Outlaws. Play illegal gigs to earn the money to pay the fee to play legally. It's a perfect trap. But they haven't even bigger problem. Imp's harp gets destroyed. Liest sits on it, I believe, trolls are heavy. That would do it. So they're broke, and now they don't even have instruments. Right. And this desperation leads them to a very mysterious shop. The shop that wasn't there yesterday, I love this troke so much. It's in so many stories. The magic shop that just appears exactly when you need it. It's a classic for a reason. And inside, it's full of junk and magical debris. And in the back, under a pile of stuff, imp finds something. The guitar. The guitar. But not just any guitar. The description of this thing. Yeah. It's genuinely chilling. It's described as looking like it's made of bone, right? A bone white finish. Exactly. And when imp picks it up, it hums. It has a life of its own. It's not a passive object.

13:19It's been waiting for someone. And Pratchett writes that the guitar plays him. That's the line, a complete reversal of how it should work. The instrument is the one with the power. And as soon as he plays it. The world changes. It creates a sound that shouldn't exist in a world that haven't discovered electricity. It's not focus, not a ballad. It has a beat, a driving compulsive rhythm. It's the birth of music with Roxanne. It is. And the reaction from Glod and Lyos is fascinating. They don't just hear it. They feel it. It makes their feet cap. It makes their fingers snap. It bypasses their logical brains and goes straight for the nervous system. It's the birth of cool. And the birth of a very dangerous new kind of magic. Because if music can move you metaphorically in our world, in disc world, it can change reality. Okay, so we've got this band forming and they've just stumbled on a magical weapon of mass percussion. Meanwhile, Susan has arrived at her grandfather's house. Death's domain. I want to spend a minute on this place.

14:20Because the way Pratchett describes it is just it's hilarious and deeply unsettling at the same time. It is. It's a place that exists outside of normal space in time. It's all black and shades of gray. There's no color. And it's always the present moment there. And the house itself. It's a copy of a human house, but he gets all the details wrong. All of them. He's spent millennia watching humans trying to understand them so he built a house like theirs. But he only understands the form, not the function. Pick the bathroom towels. Yes, the bathroom has towels. They're folded perfectly on a rail, but they're rock hard. They're completely useless. Because death understands that a towel is a rectangular object. You hang in a bathroom, but he doesn't understand fluffy or absorbent. The desk in his study has drawers that don't open. Right. It's just a solid block of wood carved into the shape of a desk. He saw a desk. He copied it, but he missed the point. The whole house is like that. It's like a stage set. It looks real from a distance, but up close, it's all just props. Except for Albert. Albert is real. Albert, yes. Very, very real. Who is Albert?

15:21Albert is death's bettler. His man servant. He's this cranky, cynical old man who used to spell the stop time for himself and ended up in death's domain. He's been alive for over 2,000 years. And he's the caretaker. While death is off, contemplating the infinite, Albert is in the kitchen. Making fried porridge. Fried porridge, that sounds absolutely disgusting. It is. It's a greasy sugary fatty mess. Albert is the most human thing in the entire domain. In the most wonderfully gross way possible. So it's Albert who explains the whole situation as Susan. He tells her about the whole. He does. This is the central metaphysical crisis of the book. Death isn't just a person. It's a fundamental force of the universe. It's a job that has to be done. And when the entity who does that job just walks away. It creates a vacuum, a whole in the fabric of reality. And the universe, as they say, abhors a vacuum. It will try to fill it with whatever is closest. And Susan is the right shit for the whole. She is the plug in the manner of speaking.

16:21She has the heredity, she has the connection. So the duty, the job itself, starts to pull her in. It sucks her into the role. She finds herself in the gallery of lifetimers. One of my favorite concepts in all the fantasy. This vast silent library where every single living being has an hourglass. And the sand is constantly flowing. It's a literal representation of your time running out. Exactly. And she sees them all billions of them. And she realizes that her job, it isn't to kill people. Right, that's a common misconception about the grim reaper in most mythologies. He doesn't actually kill you. No, he just shows up when you die. Yeah. He's there to sever the link between the soul and the body to guide you to whatever comes next. If he's not there to do that job, things get messy. Ghosts get left behind. Zombies might happen. It's cosmic clutter. A backlog. And the universe needs to be tidy. So Susan has to take up the scythe. She puts on the black robe. And she tries to do the job logically, dispassionately. But logic doesn't really work when you're dealing with life

17:23and death. Not at all. And that brings us to the moment where the two plotlines finally violently collide. The performance at the Mendid drum. The Mendid drum. The most wretched hive of scum and villainy in all of Enkmore pork. A place where the barfights are the nightly entertainment. But it's under new management. The owner, this guy, Hibiscus Dunlm, he wants to rebrand it as a theme pub. He wants to hang up some ferns, maybe serve cocktails. It's the completely misguided, doomed enterprise. But in his desperation, he hires the band. The band with Roxanne. They're still struggling with the name at this point, but yes, he hires imp, glad, and cliff to play a gig. They need the money to pay off the guild. Right. So they get up on this rickety stage. The audience is surly and drunk. They're used to throwing axes at the performers. And then impits that first chord on the bone white guitar. Describe what happens. The book is so vivid here. It's electric. The text says the music had its sleeves rolled up. It's not polite. It steals the silver. It's aggressive and powerful and mesmerizing.

18:25The entire pub just freezes. Even the wizards are there. The senior faculty from unseen university, the wizarding college. They're investigating this strange new magical disturbance. And even they, these stuffy old academics find themselves tapping their feet. And the librarian. The librarian. The orangutan. We should probably explain. The librarian of the magical university was transformed into an orangutan in a magical accident and has refused to be changed back. He finds it much easier to climb the shelves. The long story. But he loves the music. He goes absolutely berserk. He swings from the rafters. He dances on the tables. And then he leaps on stage and starts hammering away at this old beat-up piano. So now the band has a troll on Rarks, a dwarf on horn, a barred on a magical guitar, and a 30 stone ape on keys. It is the single greatest rock and roll band in the history of the universe. But this is where it all goes wrong. Because Susan shows up. She does. Not as a customer. She's on the clock. She's there for a reaping.

19:26She has an hourglass in her hand. And she looks at the name etched on it. It says, imp ecellen. So imp is supposed to die right there on stage at his first big gig. His time is up. The sand has run out. Maybe the strain of the magic is supposed to give him a heart attack, or maybe a stray axe from the crowd was meant for him we don't know. But the hourglass is empty. So Susan raises the sive. She does her duty. She swings it through him to sever his soul from his body. But nothing happens. It just doesn't work. Why? This is the central mystery of the book. The music saves him. The text describes the empty hourglass suddenly filling up with this strange shimmering blue smoke with musical notes. The music itself intervened. The music, this living entity stepped in and said, no, not yet. He's mine. So it literally extends his life. It sustains him. He's no longer living on time. He's living on borrowed music. That is such a cool concept. The song is literally keeping him alive. But that puts Susan in an absolutely terrible position,

20:28doesn't it? Oh, yeah. She's the grim reaper. She is supposed to be impartial, unstoppable. And she just failed. Or did she let him go? That's the question. Was it just the music? Or did her own humanity? Her own, you know, she thinks he's cute. Did that cause her to hesitate? She looks at this young talented kid having the night of his life and thinks, this is wrong. This is a waste. She makes a moral judgment. And death is not supposed to judge. Death is just supposed to be there. So now we have this massive paradox. Imp is alive when he should be dead. The music is growing stronger and seems to have a will of its own. And the actual original death is where, exactly. He's in the desert. He's joined the clatchin' foreign legion. Of course he has. It's the classic place people and stories go when they want to forget their past. But there's a problem. Death can't forget. He can't. He remembers everything. Past, present, and future. He remembers the future. Can you imagine the burden of that? Knowing exactly how every single thing is going to end?

21:29It's no wonder he's burnt out. There's this incredible scene where death, who's calling himself Bonitle. Bonitle? Oh, my God, I just got that. That's terrible. It's perfect. So Bonitle is sitting in the desert. And he has this conversation with a holy man who is meditating on a pillar. Yes. And he asks the holy man this profound question. How do humans do it? How do you forget? And the holy man gives all the usual answers. Time heals all wounds. You can drink, you can sleep. But none of that applies to death. He doesn't sleep. Time is meaningless to him. He is cursed with perfect total clarity all the time. It really makes you feel for him. He's not a villain in this story at all. He's a prisoner of his own job. He is. He wants to be human because he thinks humans have it easy. They get the gift of not knowing things. But while he's off trying to learn how to be ignorant, his granddaughter is back in the city. And she is done being a frightened little school girl. This is the turning point for her. This is where she decides to own the role.

22:30She changes her outfit. She does. The black robe is impractical. So she uses her power to manifest a new dress. It's still black, but it's practical, it's stylish. The text makes a point of saying it has more bodice. She embraces the aesthetic. And she learns to use the voice. The voice, yes. The way death speaks in the books, always in small caps. It's not a sound that goes through your ears. It's a voice that speaks directly into your brain. It commands obedience. It's pure authority. So she's becoming death, but she's doing it her way on her own terms. And she goes to find her grandfather. She tracks him down in the desert. She writes binky right into the middle of his legionnaire camp. And the confrontation they have, I mean, it's the real intellectual core of the book. It is. Susan is furious. She demands to know why he left, why he abandoned his duty. And he tells her, essentially, I got tired of watching the ants. He calls humans ants. Consumers of food. He's trying to detach himself. He's trying to convince himself that he doesn't care that all these little lives don't matter.

23:32But Susan won't let him off the hook that easily. She argues that he should care. He should intervene. He should save people like him. She wants him to change fate. And death gives her this incredibly hard truth. He says time is only a place. If you go back and move one grain of sand on the beach, the entire coastline might change. You can't just pick and choose who to save without risking catastrophic consequences. It's too heavy a burden for anyone being to carry. Exactly. But then she says something that just completely breaks through his cosmic persona. She talks about his knees. His bony knees. It's such a weird, specific and mundane thing to bring up. It's perfect because it's so intimate. It's what a grandchild says to her granddad. It reminds him that he's not just a cosmic principal. He's granddad. He's the one who gave her rides on his horse. He read her bedtime stories. By focusing on his knees, his physical bony, slightly ridiculous reality, she yanks him back down to personhood. She reminds him that he has connections, that he has a family. And that's the trap.

24:33You can't be an impartial aloof observer if you love someone. And while they're having this massive philosophical argument in the desert, Uncle Morpork is basically falling apart. The music has gone viral. Viral is exactly the right word. It's a pandemic of rhythm. It's spreading like a fever. We mentioned the wizards at the pub earlier, but it gets so much worse for them. To Dean. The Dean, one of the most senior stuffy wizards at the university. He starts dressing like a 50s rock and roll fan. The text mentions crepe sold shoes that are a cruel blue. Blue Swade shoes. He paints his room black. He starts using slang. He tries to grow sideburns. It's this incredible cringey, but also kind of beautiful midlife crisis. Pratchett is making a point about all this repressed energy, isn't he? Absolutely. The Dean has spent his entire life in a library following rules. The music gives him permission for the first time to just be wild. The music isn't just making people dance. It's physically destabilizing reality. It is.

25:33The librarian, the orangutan, he gets his idea to play the music on the university's great organ. And this isn't just any organ. It's a massive magical instrument powered by like captive thunderstorms. It's the most powerful instrument on the disc. And he tries to play music with rocks in on it. And the organ explodes. It just explodes. Violently. He can't handle the raw, chaotic energy of the beat. The arts chancellor has to run in and shoot the malfunctioning organ pipes with a crossbow to put it out of its misery. Only in Discworld. It's a perfect metaphor for the clash of systems. The old magic, which is structured, academic, and complex, it cannot contain the new magic, which is wild, emotional, and simple. The music is free at last. That's a line from the book. It's like a genie that's been led out of the bottle. And it's hungry. This is where the story starts to get genuinely dark. Yeah. The music isn't just fun anymore. It's consuming its creator. It's consuming imp. He's becoming transparent, right? He's literally fading away.

26:34The music is using him up like a battery. He's becoming a one-hit wonder in the most literal, terrifying sense of the phrase. He's losing his identity is in Aussie land and is just becoming the musician and archetype. So the stakes for the finale are set. Imp is literally playing for his life if he stops the music, he dies. Susan is trying to fix the timeline without having to reap the voice he has a crush on. And death is racing back from the desert on Binky, trying to stop the music before it completely shatters reality. It's a chaotic, loud, messy convergence. And it all happens at a big, free concert. The Discworlds Woodstock moment. Exactly. Now, I don't want to spoil the exact ending because the way Pratchett resolves all of this is incredibly clever and bittersweet. But I do want to talk about the aftermath because eventually the music has to stop. It does. The fever breaks. The glory is a book calls it fades. The band breaks up. But things don't just go back to the way they were, do they? Not at all. And that's the real beauty of it. The silence after the music is a different kind of silence

27:36than the one that came before it. Ike Mooreport has been permanently changed. The people have been changed. They know they can dance now. They know they can rebel. The authority the guilds has been broken. New bands start forming. New ideas are in the air. It's like the entire cultural revolution of the 1960s was compressed into one frantic week. Precisely. The magical music with a capital M, it goes away. It moves on to another universe, perhaps ours. But the impact of it remains burned into the city's memory. I want to circle back to that big theme we touched on at the start. The idea of the musician as a vessel, not a creator, Pratchett seems to be saying that great art isn't something you make up. It's something you catch. Belief makes a hollow place. Something has to roll in to sell it. That's the key quote. Pratchett is suggesting that the music existed before imp. It was out there in the ether. This platonic ideal of rock and roll. And it was just looking for a way in. Imp and his magic guitar were just the right lightning rod at the right time.

28:37That's both a really inspiring idea and also a kind of terrifying one. It takes away some of the agency from the artist. It does. It suggests that if imp hadn't picked up that guitar, someone else would have. The 1960s were going to happen. Rock and roll was going to be born. The universe demanded it. And what about that theme of fading? We see it with Susan who fades to be normal. And we see it with imp who fades because the music is eating him alive. It's all about identity and memory. To become famous, to become a legend, is a kind of death. The real person gets consumed by the myth. We don't remember imp, the boy from Yamatos who missed his home. We remember the icon, the lead singer of the band with Roxanne. The person fades. The idea remains. And death himself is the ultimate icon. He's a role, not a person. He is. But what Susan teaches him is that he can be both. He can be the skeleton with the scythe, the cosmic inevitability. And he can be the granddad with the bony knees who tells stories to his granddaughter. You have to fight to keep your personhood in the face of the overwhelming power of the role you play.

29:39That is an incredibly deep takeaway from a book that also features a skateboarding rat skeleton. That's Prashan and Nutshell. He's the absolute master of hiding profound philosophy behind silly jokes and bad puns. He really is. So we've unpacked the plot, the characters, the metaphysics. But before we wrap up, I have to ask you, what does this book tell us about the act of listening to music? I think, I think it tells us to be careful. Careful. How so? Music is powerful. It's a kind of magic. It bypasses all your logic filters and goes straight for your emotions. It makes you feel things you didn't ask to feel. It can unite a thousand people in a stadium, make the move and breathe as one single organism. Pratchett is saying that's not a metaphor, that's magic. Real actual magic. And like all forms of magic, it should be treated with a healthy dose of respect. And maybe don't play a guitar that looks like it's made of bone and hums with its own power. That is also a very practical and important takeaway. Always avoid cursed instruments. Solid advice for life.

30:40Well, this has been an absolutely wild ride. We've gone from a girl's boarding school to the deserts of Clatch. And we ended up in a mosh pit in Anchmore Park. Just another day on the disc. I feel like I need to go listen to some early rock and roll now. Or possibly learn how to handle a scythe. I would. I would probably stick with the rock and roll. Probably safer. Thank you so much for walking us through all of this. It's just amazing how much depth is hidden in a book that is on the surface, just a bunch of brilliant jokes. That's the genius of Terry Pratchett. He makes you laugh. And then while your mouth is open, he feeds you a truth. While your mouth is open, he feeds you a truth. I love that. We're going to leave it right there for everyone listening. Here is a final thought for you to mull over. Think about your favorite song. The one that feels like it was written just for you. The one that perfectly captures something you could never put into words. Did the artist create that? Or were they just lucky enough to tune their radio to the right frequency in the universe and write down what they heard? The haunting thought.

31:41Indeed. Thanks for listening to The Deep Dive. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.