The Invisible Scholars Club
The Invisible Scholars' Club (English title: Unseen Academicals ) is a fantasy novel by Terry Pratchett . It is the thirty-seventh Discworld novel. The Invisible Scholars Club was published in 2009. The action takes place in Ankh-Morpork. The Club of Invisible Scholars is a wizarding story, which is why Mustrum Ridcully, the Arch Chancellor, plays a leading role. Just as important, however, is the protagonist of a newly established ethnic group , Mr Nutt, the orc. The two are instrumental in ensuring that the Invisible University can muster a football team again and therefore not starve to death because of threatened brutal financial cuts. In addition to football , the book also plays with a number of other topics, including: team building , fashion and models , university traditions , university rivalries and stereotypes .
The English title refers to the tradition of British football teams to nominally announce their connection to local educational institutions, for example Hamilton Academical or Edinburgh Academicals.
action
As usual with Terry Pratchett, the Club of Invisible Scholars tells several intertwined stories. From the point of view of set theory , the invisible university, its multi-story architecture and its multi-layered staff play a central role. A relevant subset includes the fate of two couples - Glenda Zuckerbohne and her friend Juliet Stollop on one side, Trevor Likely and Nutt on the other. A subset closely linked to this subset are the magicians and a game called “kick the ball” or soccer . Last but not least, the urban diva , Ankh-Morpork itself, with its football clubs anchored in the various districts, forms a considerable excess. Players and fans of: Die Tollen Sisters, Alte Freunde Düstergut, Eintracht Pennhügel, Die Wanderer, FC Saustallhügel and VfL Carelessness exert a significant influence.
As with a plant, the different stories develop from below, from the roots, upwards, to flowering. Below would be the cellars and vaults of the Invisible University. Trevor and Nutt toil here as candle droppers to provide adequate light on the upper floors. But down here is also the night kitchen, which is under Glenda's command. Juliet somehow pulls this through because she is her friend and neighbor. Glenda is as clever and efficient as Juliet is beautiful and mentally a little underexposed - a familiar constellation. Trevor Likely, the son of the most famous but unfortunately dead football player Dave Likely, the only person who has ever scored 4 goals, falls madly in love with Juliet and vice versa. That would not be worth mentioning if both were not born to different, mutually hostile football fan clubs. The drama is practically mapped out.
Nutt, in turn, formally Trevor's subordinate, who actually does all the work, is an experiment, both physically and mentally. He's not long been a candle dropper and supposedly a goblin . In fact, he is an orc who, at the request of Lady Margolotta, was smuggled into the city and the university through Lord Ventinari to round off his education . It should be noted that orcs are a truly unpopular species and in fact almost extinct. For historical reasons, the word orc evokes fear, horror and lust for murder all over the Discworld. Well, maybe not everywhere, but Glenda is definitely willing to thoroughly check this spontaneous reaction after she's allowed to meet Nutt's acquaintance. Thanks to his extensive training, Nutt is a kind of universal genius. He speaks 16 languages and has mastered various handicrafts such as blacksmithing , leatherworking and alchemy . Nevertheless, he constantly doubts his worth and tries to give himself more value through good performance, according to the motto: "The world should have become a better place when you finally leave it" - a sentence Glenda strangely familiar with.
The regular use of the Sodomir trust funds covers 87.4% of the Invisible University's food budget - a tremendous sum given the extensive culinary care that faculty and students at this institute receive. Ponder Stibbons , in his capacity as “Master of Traditions”, discovered that this donation is tied to a condition. The university must maintain a football team and take part in the game, otherwise there is a risk of a maximum of three varieties on the cheese platter, vegetable-based food at least three times a week and a maximum of three meals a day - reason enough for the Arch Chancellor to order the formation of a team, even though the patrician does Strictly rejects the game in its current form.
The current version of the soccer game looks like this: Two teams run through the streets of the city after a wooden ball padded with leather. With one shot you try to hit the wooden post marking the gate. There is no playing field, the space in the crowd is the space in which the teams have to move. Goals are extremely rare. But brutal riots are the order of the day. According to the will of the patrician, but also according to the wishes of the magicians, this must change. By chance, archaeologists find an ancient urn in the cellars of the Royal Art Museum which, divinely sanctioned, contains the original rules of football. Some enthusiastic publications in the Morporkian media prepare the public for massive innovations in gaming. This change is made tasty by the fact that everyone should prepare for the game : an encounter between the team from the Invisible University and a selection of the best players in town - according to the new rules!
In order to make the announced changes manifest, the magicians organize a new, actually playable ball. From the curiosity chest, an ancient, mysterious artifact, they let HEX throw a real soccer ball, which they quickly copy in the “Street of the Clever Artisans” to let. After exactly 14 hours, all removed objects automatically return to the chest of drawers. Trevor Likely and Nutt are responsible for this important copying process. The two candle droppers run into the Arch Chancellor by chance when he is looking for someone to take on this assignment. A few narrative entanglements later, Nutt is the coach of the new team and Trevor serves as a technical role model. Trev swore to his mother that he would never play football in his life, but the family legacy cannot be denied and is reflected in his perfect mastery of a tin can. Together they forge a real team out of the tech-savvy individuals of the Invisible University (magicians are by definition not team players).
Strange things are going on in the night kitchen with Glenda and Juliet too. Juliet receives a long, irresistible love letter from Trev, which Nutt actually wrote and which Glenda reads, explaining the long words to Juliet. To get other thoughts, the two of them visit their first fashion show at Shissa, a totally hip dwarf designer clothes store that shows off the season's latest product: micro-chain. Juliet, who passed for a tall dwarf because of her height, was chosen within a few minutes by the chief designer to be the micro-chain model. A glued-on beard, a few vague instructions and the sensation of the year is on a catwalk for the first time in her life - and she enjoys it. Glenda, a little sherry-loving, has a lot of trouble getting the new starlet back into the night kitchen, but not without getting her friend a $ 50 fee. A unique career emerges for Juliet as the mysterious Jewels, but Glenda thoroughly distrusts such daydreams.
Shortly before the big game, the ork-nature breaks at Nutt. He has always been unnaturally strong, now he is developing a body structure to match, including razor-sharp, extendable claws. It is becoming more and more of an invincible fighting machine than the Orcs were created by the Igors in the Dark Years. With Glenda's help, he confronts the past of his species and discovers that cruelty and brutality are not innate in the orcs. Behind them always stood the rulers with their whips and swords. This makes it possible for Nutt to continue to struggle for recognition in the city.
The day of the big game comes and the whole city is gathered in the hippodrome . It quickly turns out that only half of the city's team is made up of the best players. The other half are the most brutal thugs of the individual fan groups and they have their own ideas about football. One after the other, the players of the Invisible University are fouled like a hospital. The referee , the former dean and now arch chancellor at Brazeneck University in Pseudopolis, is overwhelmed and cannot prevent it. After all, there is only one substitute on the bench at the Invisible University: Trevor Likely, who swore he would never, never play. Well, he breaks his word and thanks to his outstanding technique he shoots the university to a well-deserved victory.
Others
Translated by Gerald Jung; also as an abridged audio book on CD and unabridged as an MP3 download, speaker Boris Aljinovic, ISBN 3-83710-402-8 .
German edition
Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-442-54673-2 .
Web links
- Unseen_Academicals.html table of contents
- Unseen_Academicals.html Notes
- Unseen_Academicals.html Quotes
- Unseen Academicals on LSPACE (English)
- The Club of Invisible Scholars , entry in the German-language DiscWiki