Soul Music recap

When Susan Sto Helit's parents are killed in a coach accident, Death, who is her grandfather, cannot bear it and abandons his duty to go away and try to forget. Susan, sixteen and rigorously sensible, is fetched from boarding school by Albert and the Death of Rats and made to take up the Duty in his place. At the same time a young harpist from Llamedos, Imp y Celyn, arrives in Ankh-Morpork, is refused a licence by the Guild of Musicians, and buys an ancient guitar from a shop that is not there the next day. The guitar carries the Music With Rocks In, a force older than the Disc that uses musicians and discards them. With the dwarf Glod and the troll Cliff, Imp becomes Buddy of the Band With Rocks In; the music sweeps the city, infects the wizards, and makes Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler rich. Susan discovers that Buddy should already be dead and that the music is keeping him alive for its own ends, and repeatedly intervenes. At the climax Death returns, drives the music out of the world, and restores Imp's life, then takes Susan's memory of it and sends her back to school.

Previously: Death is the robed skeleton who collects the souls of the dying, and he has been curious about the living for a very long time. He once took on a farm boy named Mort as his apprentice, and when the arrangement ended badly he set matters right at his own cost, dismissed the boy from his service, and gave him his blessing to marry Ysabell, the daughter Death had adopted and raised in his house. Mort became Duke of Sto Helit and the two had a daughter. Later, Death was briefly relieved of his office altogether and spent a season living as a mortal farmhand under the name Bill Door, harvesting a field and learning, at first hand, what it is to have a limited amount of time and to lose people. He fought to get his duty back and won it. From that period there also remains a small subordinate, the Death of Rats. Death returned to his work permanently changed, and permanently attached to the living in a way his office does not allow for.

Mort, Duke of Sto Helit, and his wife Ysabell are killed when their coach goes off a road in a storm. Death, who is Ysabell's father and therefore the girl's grandfather, cannot accept it, and the loss is worse for him because he forgets nothing, ever. Rather than continue, he walks away from the Duty entirely and goes away in search of a way to forget, which for him has never been possible and which he intends to attempt anyway. Their daughter Susan, sixteen years old, is left at the Quirm College for Young Ladies, where she has always been an awkward pupil: sharply logical, difficult to teach anything she considers untrue, and possessed of abilities she has never thought worth mentioning, including the knack of not being noticed. Meanwhile, in the rainy land of Llamedos, a young harpist named Imp y Celyn quarrels with his father and sets out for Ankh-Morpork to make a living from music.

With Death gone, the Duty is going undone, and Albert and the Death of Rats come to fetch Susan. Binky, Death's horse, takes her out into a world where she can see lifetimers running out and is expected to be present when they do. She resists, argues, and starts doing the work anyway. In Ankh-Morpork, Imp discovers that playing for money requires a Guild of Musicians licence he cannot afford, and falls in with two other unlicensed players: Glod Glodsson, a dwarf horn player, and Lias Bluestone, a troll who drums on rocks. When Imp's harp is destroyed in a brawl he buys a replacement from a small shop in an alley, an old guitar priced at a dozen dollars, and the shop is not there when he goes back. The instrument is far older than it looks, and playing it produces a music nobody on the Disc has heard before.

The Band With Rocks In begins to play, and the effect on audiences is immediate and physical. The music spreads through Ankh-Morpork faster than any fashion: young people change how they dress and speak, crowds form wherever the band appears, and the sound gets into places it has no business being, including Unseen University, where the Dean acquires a leather jacket and opinions and the Archchancellor's authority stops working. Cut-Me-Own-Throat Dibbler appoints himself manager, renames Imp as Buddy, and has merchandise on sale before the audience has left. Susan, working the Duty, encounters Buddy and finds something wrong with him that she cannot explain, and finds herself unwilling to do what the job requires. The Death of Rats and a foul-tempered raven take an unhelpful interest in her decisions.

Susan learns what is actually happening. Buddy's life should already have ended, and it is the music that is keeping him going, because it wants a player and intends to keep this one until it has finished with him. The Music With Rocks In is not a style but a thing: older than the Disc, drifting between worlds, it takes hold of musicians, drives them to play, makes them briefly enormous, and uses them up. Susan begins deliberately intervening to keep Buddy alive, which is precisely the abuse of the Duty that ended her father's apprenticeship. Albert warns her where it leads. Far away, Death has enlisted in the Klatchian Foreign Legion, an outfit whose members have all joined in order to forget and have all forgotten what it was, and his own experiment is failing, because he is constitutionally incapable of forgetting anything and drink does nothing to a body with no chemistry to affect. At the University, Ponder Stibbons works out more about the phenomenon than anyone wants to hear.

The band becomes the largest thing in the city. Imitators appear everywhere, the wizards form an ensemble of their own, and the Librarian is recruited to a piano when one is needed. This brings the Guild of Musicians down on them: its secretary, Mr Clete, cannot license the band, cannot control it, and cannot tolerate it, and he arranges for the problem to be removed by people who do that professionally. Dibbler, meanwhile, is thinking bigger, and announces a free festival, an event on a scale nobody has attempted, with the band at the centre of it. Susan keeps standing between Buddy and the end of his life, and the music keeps arranging opportunities. Death, having failed entirely to forget, begins the journey back.

The free festival happens, an enormous crowd and the band at the height of what the music can make of them, and afterwards the tour continues because the music will not let it stop. The pattern it wants is clear enough: a musician who burns very brightly and then dies young becomes permanent, and the music has arranged such endings before. It sets up an accident on the road for Buddy that mirrors the one that killed Susan's parents. Susan reaches him and holds the moment open, but she is a sixteen-year-old standing against something that has crossed between worlds and has done this many times before, and holding it is all she can do. It is at this point that Death, having discovered that the one thing he cannot do is forget, comes back to take up his own duty.

Death confronts the music itself, forces it out of the guitar and out of the world, and destroys the instrument; the music leaves the Disc to look for another one, and only echoes of it remain behind. He then reaches back and undoes the accident, so that Imp y Celyn lives, and the arrangement he made for his daughter's husband long ago is quietly repeated for his granddaughter's sake. Imp goes home to Llamedos with his life restored. Glod and Cliff survive the whole business better off than they began it, and Dibbler, having sold everything the fashion could be printed on, turns to his next enterprise. Death resumes the Duty. As a last kindness he takes away Susan's memory of Buddy and of everything that happened, and returns her to school and an ordinary life, though the kindness is incomplete: she is still her grandfather's granddaughter, still not always visible when she chooses otherwise, and something of the music, and of the boy, stays with her.

Death comes back. His attempt to forget fails, because forgetting is the one thing he cannot do, and he returns to find his granddaughter standing between the music and the boy it intends to use up. The Music With Rocks In has arranged Buddy's death to complete him as a legend, and Susan cannot hold it off alone. Death confronts the music directly, drives it out of the guitar and out of the world, and then does what he did once before for the sake of someone he cared about: he reaches back and puts the accident right, so that Imp y Celyn lives. The music leaves the Disc and goes looking for somewhere else, leaving only echoes behind, and the guitar is destroyed. Imp survives with his life ahead of him and goes home to Llamedos; Glod and Cliff come out of it intact and better off than they started; Dibbler, having sold everything a fashion could be printed on, moves on to his next enterprise. Death takes back the Duty and, as a kindness, removes Susan's memory of Buddy and of the whole affair, returning her to school and to an ordinary life. The kindness is imperfect: she is still who she is, she still cannot always be seen when she does not wish to be, and traces of what happened remain.