Soul Music

Discworld, Book 16

By: Terry Pratchett

Narrated by: Tony Robinson

Length: 3 hrs and 30 mins

Publisher's summary

Other children receive xylophones. Susan just had to ask her grandfather to take his vest off. Yes. There's a Death in the family. It's hard to grow up normally when Grandfather rides a white horse and wields a scythe: especially when you have to take over the family business, and everyone mistakes you for the Tooth Fairy. And especially when you have to face the new and addictive music that has entered Discworld. It's lawless. It changes people. It's called Music With Rocks In. It's got a beat and you can dance to it, but...it's alive. And it won't fade away.

© Terry and Lyn Pratchett; (P) Corgi Audio

Critic reviews

"Classic English humour, with all the slapstick, twists, and dry observations you could hope for." (The Times)

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.

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.

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!

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