A review by bluejayreads
Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

  • Plot- or character-driven? N/A
  • Strong character development? No

3.25

This is one of the few Discworld books not part of a sub-series. Since I’ve read at least one book of each sub-series at this point, it’s a little weird to be with completely new characters in a completely new place with none of the tiny overlaps I expect from Discworld books (except for some of it being in the city of Ephebe, which I’m pretty sure was also mentioned briefly in Pyramids.) 

The protagonist of Small Gods is Brutha, a novice in the service of the Great God Om. Brutha has an eidetic memory – meaning he can recall everything he has ever seen, heard, or done all the way back to the moment of his birth – but he can’t read because he lacks the intelligence to connect spoken sounds with written symbols. He doesn’t mind hard work, never complains, and believes wholeheartedly in the Great God Om with an innocent, childlike faith. 

There’s not a whole lot of plot actually involved in this story, and a lot of that is because Brutha is quiet, unintelligent, and unambitious. Everything that happens to him is due to the machinations of the Great God Om (currently a tortoise and desperate to not be a tortoise anymore) and a particularly ambitious and ruthless leader of one church department. He talks to some philosophers in Ephebe (Discworld’s ancient Greece), treks across a desert, and pretty much meanders through a plot that other characters set up for him. 

The point of the story seems to be a satire of organized religion, especially Catholicism. It has: 
  • The big, multi-tiered church structure with one old guy at the top who’s at least 75% figurehead
  • A bunch of prescribed prayers, Important Days for feasts or fasts, and rituals that have lost any connection with the reason they are done (if they had any reason to start with)
  • An all-powerful, all-knowing deity who speaks only through appointed prophets
  • Scriptures, written by said prophets directly from the mouth of god (supposedly), which form the backbone of all doctrine; knowledge and memorization of these is essential to religion
  • A Quisition that tortures confessions (true or not) out of heretics, complete with believing that suspicion = crime because Om wouldn’t let them have a suspicion if it wasn’t true
  • And the strong conviction that their religion is the only true religion, their god is the only one that exists (which is demonstrably false in the Discworld), and the best way to deal with disbelievers is to conquer them and force Omnianism upon them
 
So it’s not exactly a subtle analog of organized religion and Catholicism/Christianity in particular. The disappointing thing was it didn’t really make a commentary on any of it. The Omnian church was an obvious caracature of the Catholic church, but that’s as far as it went. The idea seemed to be, “What if god, in a lowly form, came down to a caricature of the Catholic church, and also he was an asshole?”
 
Personally, I found it interesting enough. I think that’s mainly because I am interested in deities and religion in general, though. Brutha may not have been a spectacular character and the plot might have been weak, but there were plenty of interesting bits about Omnianism and some new tidbits about how the small gods of the Discworld work, and that was enough to keep me reading. Someone with less of an interest in religions, though, would probably find this one of the less enjoyable entries in the Discworld canon.
 
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