Clara’s Verdict
Death, it turns out, offers surprisingly reasonable terms of employment: free board, use of the company horse, and being dead is not compulsory. That is the offer made to a boy called Mort, and it remains the finest job interview in fantasy fiction, if you ask me. The fourth Discworld novel gives us Death as Terry Pratchett imagined him, a black-robed skeleton with a scythe who ushers souls into the next world whilst remaining fond of cats and endlessly baffled by humanity, then asks what happens when such a being yearns to experience what humanity really has to offer and hires an apprentice to cover the rounds. My honest take: this is comic fantasy with a warm, morbid heart, and the premise still feels audacious. The one caveat is that Pratchett’s deadpan cosmic humour is its own dialect. Most people take to it instantly; a few never quite do.
What This Edition Is and Who It’s For
This is the 2022 recording of Mort from Transworld Digital, released on 27 October 2022 and running 7 hours and 57 minutes, part of the wave of new Discworld recordings behind which Penguin reports over a million audiobooks sold. The production is the draw. Sian Clifford narrates, Bill Nighy reads the footnotes, Peter Serafinowicz stars as the voice of Death, and there is a new theme tune composed by James Hannigan. As book 4 of the series, Mort is also, in my judgement, one of the friendliest doors into Discworld: the apprenticeship story is self-contained, and nothing is required of a newcomer beyond a willingness to laugh at mortality. A listener gets a complete novel, unhurried at nearly eight hours, dressed with just enough production to feel like an occasion.
Sian Clifford, with Bill Nighy in the Footnotes
Sian Clifford, the BAFTA award-winning actor known for Fleabag, Vanity Fair and Quiz, takes the main narration, and precision is what that casting promises: Pratchett’s comedy is engineered sentence by sentence, and it rewards a performer who can keep a straight face while everything around her grows sillier. The structural masterstroke, though, is the footnotes. Pratchett’s footnotes are not decoration, they are punchlines, and handing them to Bill Nighy turns each one into a small event rather than an interruption. Peter Serafinowicz, meanwhile, gives Death the vast, dry voice the character demands on the page. The whole sits somewhere between a straight reading and a lightly staged radio piece, and that suits this particular book unusually well, given who its leading skeleton is.
What Readers Say
The edition holds 4.7 from 17 ratings. Seventeen opinions is a dinner party rather than a poll, so I offer the number with that health warning attached, but 4.7 is about as well as dinner parties ever go. There are no written listener reviews available to me for this edition, and I will not conjure any. Taken together with the popularity Penguin reports for these new recordings, the early signs all point the same way: listeners are happy.
Who Should Listen?
Start here if you are Discworld-curious and want an entry point with a self-contained story and a starry cast, or if you like your fantasy to treat the afterlife as a workplace with staffing issues. Fans of dry British comedy will be well served, and so will anyone who has ever suspected the Grim Reaper deserves better press. Skip it if you want your stakes grim and your magic solemn, because solemnity is the one thing this book refuses to supply. Everyone else should sign the apprenticeship papers. The terms, as I say, are surprisingly reasonable.
