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Book Review: Small Gods October 24, 2009
Small Gods is, what the 13th Discworld book by Terry Pratchett? Like Pyramids, it's more of a stand alone book, with only few of the characters appearing in subsequent or previous books. It tells the story of Om, a god who decides to manifest himself physically on the Disk and is surprised to find himself trapped in the form of a lowly tortise due to a lack of followers. There are supposedly people who worship him, but everyone is sort of going along with the rote parts of the religion without really believing in it. And also, there's the matter of the high priest Vorbis, who compels them all to continue out of fear more than faith.
The sole exception to all this is a somewhat dim-witted Novice named Brutha, who is apparently the last person who genuinely believes in Om and who thus is the only one who can hear the highly frustrated god-cum-tortise when he shows up at the monestary. Brutha is also gifted with a perfect memory, so when Vorbis enlists his help in a holy war on a neighboring country disguised as diplomacy, Om goes along because he has no other choice and has to fight for his own right to exist as a god.
Like with a lot of the other Discworld books, there's some great social satire going on here. The obvious targtets are organized religion and zealots, but Pratchett also enjoys poking fun at the philosophers who serve as a stand in for secular science and who aren't much better than the institutionalized religion they oppose. It's basically more of Pratchett taking modern themes to their extreme and using his fantastical setting to present them in an absurd light. Any attempt, for example, to tell this kind of story using the context of Christianity and Christ's coming back as a bleating lamb instead of a tortise would have been seen as sensational and not nearly as widely applicable to other religions or institutions. Pratchett manages to make it both funny and thoughtful without that.
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Tags: Book Review, Fantasy, Small Gods, Terry Pratchett
