Starting a few months ago I decided to read the whole of the Discworld series. I’ve just finished the fifth book – Sourcery – but this is the first one I’m going to review. I’ll probably write up the first four at some point, if only to demonstrate why I’m kind of disappointed with this one.
Yep…I didn’t really enjoy Sourcery. It started off kind of similar to Equal Rites – in that book, the 8th daughter of an 8th son was *gasp* a Wizard. In Sourcery, there’s an 8th son of an 8th son of an 8th son, who is a Sourcerer – a source of magic – something that hasn’t been seen on the Disc since the Mage Wars. The Sourcerer, a young boy called Coin, has a magic staff inhabited by his bitter father which persuades him into taking over Unseen University. The aim of this is to make Wizards a powerful force on the Disc once more, but it has terrible consequences for the universe and Must Be Stopped.
So far so good. Rincewind comes into the story – we assume to save the day – but then it all gets a bit confused. He meets a beautiful heroine, daughter of Cohen the Barbarian, and after some unfortunate events they end up in Al Khali where they meet the Seriph and a wannabe Hero called Nijel.
Coin the Sourcerer, the most interesting thing about the story, basically drops off the page and we don’t see him again until the showdown begins. It’s not that I don’t like hearing about Rincewind’s misadventures, it just felt like one too many characters were introduced and the sideshow became the main event.
In the end, Coin, who has been happily causing havoc as the backdrop for Rincewind and Co, changes his mind in the blink of an eye and puts everything back the way it was. He leaves the Disc for his own magical world and is never seen again. It’s a pretty quick ending, and I was left wondering if the story even needed a Sourcerer at all.
I’m sure Conina (the heroine) and Nijel will be back in other books, and maybe they’ll do better there. Sourcery just lacks coherence, leaping from one scene to another and abandoning (what I thought should have been) the central theme. What started out as a really cool idea just got lost in the same old “Rincewind’s having a bad day” story.
I have to be honest, Sourcery disappointed me 
This is the first Discworld book I haven’t liked however, so all in all that’s pretty good going.