★★★☆☆ The Last Continent, by Terry Pratchett
This is not a book about Australia
The Last Continent
Terry Pratchett
This is not a book about Australia
Those are almost the very first words of Terry Pratchett's The Last Continent. He continues
No, it’s about somewhere entirely different which just happens to be, here and there, a bit … australian. Still … no worries, right?
I didn't really get this one.
I don't know a lot about Australia. I've worked with Australian colleagues, and I've read books about Australia, both serious histories and fiction. But I've never been there.
This is one of Sir Terry's "Let's be totally random" Discworld novels. A whole lot of random stuff happens that doesn't particularly make sense. It might make more sense if you've spent time in Australia, but I kind of doubt it. It has portals that do time travel and teleportation, and the faculty of Unseen University and an Australian XXXXian university called Bugarup University. And there's an ecological catastrophe that Rincewind is somehow responsible for... No one but Pratchett could get away with this sort of incoherent nonsense. He does, but not by much. He manages to keep being funny even when he's not actually making any sense.
I was a little sad in that we didn't see much of Rincewind's constant companion, the Luggage. I was a little uncertain about whether the Luggage would still be with Rincewind, after it apparently fathered a family at the end of Interesting Times. But it is. Or something like it is -- I leave open the possibility that Rincewind's current luggage is one of the children of the original Luggage. This is made more plausible when Rincewind berates it about sartorial choices as if it were a petulant teenage daughter.
I consumed The Last Continent in audiobook form, and I would recommend this, for the sake of the diverse and over-the-top Australian accents. Narrator Colin Morgan is Irish, not Australian, but he manages what I, in my ignorance, judge to be a pretty good job, or at least he manages to sound funny.