Believe: Small Gods

Small Gods by Terry Pratchett

Corgi

Pp. 381

Many people list Small Gods as the best of the Discworld novels. It is, however, probably my least favourite of the thirteen I have read so far. This is mainly due to the fact that the satire seems more obvious than in Pratchett’s other works, but also because organised religion, squabbling philosophers and the nature of belief are such easy targets for mockery.

The story opens in the city of Omnia, whose chief god, Om, has been reduced to a pitiful existence in the form of a turtle because no one really believes in him anymore. Gods need belief to live and thrive, and they fear becoming small gods, barely existing out in the desert wastelands with no believers at all. Om’s religion exists to perpetuate itself, with its rituals and vicious punishments and wars presided over by the psychotic Deacon Vorbis, like a sort of Inquisitor. 

One simple lad, Brutha, does believe in Om, and hears him telepathically when tending to his melon patch. Brutha’s belief is just enough to sustain Om, although the god has a lot of explaining to do. Brutha tells Om that according to The Book of Ossory as dictated to Ossory by Om, Om is omnipotent, but Om counters that not only did he not dictate these words, but “Don’t even remember anyone called Ossory.” He denies he chose anyone to tell his story. “They chose themselves”.

Furthermore, Om admits that he may have not strictly told the truth when he said there was no other god than him. “I exaggerated a bit. But they’re not that good. There’s one of ’em that sits around playing a flute most of the time and chasing milkmaids. I don’t call that very divine. Call that very divine? I don’t.”

The novel was written in 1992, but its discourse on certainty in religion and politics feels particularly pertinent in our post-truth world thirty years on. “Fear is strange soil. Mainly it grows obedience like corn, which grows in rows and makes weeding easy. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.” Philosophers gather in town squares and brawl in bars over esoteric topics. Discussion can quickly escalate to argument followed by war, which is often binary and almost always arbitrary. While uncertainty can be troubling, it can also bring comfort with the knowledge that there are no absolutes. One character opines, “You don’t know. That’s what stops everyone going mad, the uncertainty of it, the feeling that it might work out all right after all.” Another counters, “Last night there seemed to be a chance. Anything was possible last night. That was the trouble with last nights. They were always followed by this mornings.”

Mere mortals struggle to make sense of life – hence the plethora of philosophers – but the gods are literally above it all. As the novel draws to a close, it returns to its beginnings, as Om surveys the world from his vantage point above the Hub. In a reference to the famous fable, he considers, “It seemed simpler when you were up here. It was all a game. You forgot that it wasn’t a game down there. People died. Bits got chopped off. We’re like eagles up here, he thought. Sometimes we show a tortoise how to fly. Then we let go.” Pratchett suggests that if there were gods, they have a vicious sense of humour and a total lack of decency.

Friday Five: Books Read in April

1. Come Death and High Water by Ann Cleeves (MacMillan) - This is the second in the George and Molly Palmer-Jones series in which Ann Cleeves acknowledges the influence of the Golden Age mysteries. A group of birdwatchers gather for a committee weekend on an island which is cut off by a storm and a high tide. The first victim is the cartoon-like character (which the author revels in creating) Charlie Todd, who will obviously be bumped off as he has decided to sell off the island and everyone has a motive for murder. Each suspect is interviewed separately by the curt and proessional Superintendent who has been sent over to conduct the investigation, while our man George observes and passes comment on the proceedings. He is dedicated to the task, but also swept away by the brleak and beautiful scenery. “Nothing mattered but the effort of walking against the wind, the sand stinging at his eyes and the surface water blowing around his boots.”
2. Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi (Penguin) - This novel is so similar to Bernadine Evaristo's Girl, Woman,Other that I'm surprised there wasn't a plaigirism case. This was written first and is American, whereas Evaristo's focusses on the British immigrant experice. The book has a family tree in the beginning, which is essential, as it covers the lives of several different characters, each one in a separate episodic chapter, but all related. The stories of the multiple generations descending from Ghana have distinct female voices and a shared focus on the historical and social complexities of the Black female experience.
3. Small Gods by Terry Pratchett (Corgi) - In the thirteenth novel of the Discworld series, Terry Pratchett takes pot shots at organised religion, squabbling philosophers and the nature of belief. These are such easy targets that this novel feels lesser than many of his works, like shooting fish in a barrel. The story opens in the city of Omnia, whose chief god, Om, has been reduced to a pitiful existence in the form of a turtle because no one really believes in him anymore. Gods need belief to live and thrive, and they fear becoming small gods, barely existing out in the desert wastelands with no believers at all. Mere mortals struggle to make sense of life – hence the plethora of philosophers – but the gods are literally above it all, playing games with humans as their playthings. The novel was written in 1992, but its discourse on certainty in religion and politics feels particularly pertinent in our post-truth world thirty years on.
4. The Dead of Winter by Nicola Upson (Faber & Faber) - This is the ninth in a series featuring the writer Josephine Tey as a detective. It's a smart concept (I believe it's also been done with Agatha Christie in a similar role) and although I haven't read any of the others, this was enjoyable enough out of sequence. The novel is set in 1939 where Nazis and swastikas abound, and Hilaria St Aubyn is raising money for refugees by hosting a Christmas party at a castle on St Michael’s Mount, which people bid to attend. The mystery guest, accompanied by Tey’s old pal Detective Chief Inspector Penrose, is none other than the world’s most famous movie star, Marlene Deitrich. It’s all a bit bonkers and quite fun as the incongruity of the joy of seasonal festivities mixes with the horror of murder. It’s full of thrilling set pieces, such as being at the mercy of the tides and the weather with all communication lines cut off. There are also some genuine plot twists which keep it intriguing. 
5. The Choke by Sofie Laguna (Allen & Unwin) - This is relentlessly grim; Australian poverty porn with a rape thrown in – in the style of Trent Dalton. Everyone is suffering some form of trauma and neglect, and most of the physical violence is perpetrated against women. Justine lives with her grandfather, pop, as her mother, Donna, died giving birth to her, and her father, Ray, comes and goes at random. She has two half-brothers, who fare no better in the paternal stakes, and their mother, Relle, will not even look at Justine as Ray left her for Donna. Pop is a Korean vet, struggling with PTSD, and Justine’s only friend is Michael, a boy who is taunted at school due to his cerebral palsy. Told through Justine's eyes, this simply doesn't ring true - she is capable and dyslexic, in a world of firing guns, collecting eggs and smoking cigarettes but has no idea about pregnancy. You know where this is going. 

Bedtime stories: Witches Abroad

Witches Abroad by Terry Pratchett

Corgi Books

Pp.286

This, the twelfth novel in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld series, is the second that revolves specifically around the three witches: Granny Weatherwax; Nanny Ogg and Magrat. In Wyrd Sisters, readers were introduced to these characters, and it is a delight to welcome them back like old friends. Magrat inherits a wand from Desiderata so she must become a fairy godmother and interfere in stories: she can’t help but turn things into pumpkins and she tries to stop Embers from going to the ball and marrying a prince, who is, in fact, a frog. Stories have power because they inform belief, and those who control the narrative have the greatest power of all.

It transpires that Granny Weatherwax has a sister, Lily – now calling herself Lilith – who wants to force people into enacting the stereotypes of the fairytales, living in a land where everyone must be happy whether they like it or not. Lily lets several stories happen simultaneously; like the evil queen who appears in the mirror, she uses mirror magic as a form of control. She has her own form of power (is she the good or the bad witch, and which one does that make Granny Weatherwax?). “She had buried three husbands, and at least two of them had been already dead.” Pratchett touches upon myths and legends as well as fairytales, so Circe, Bluebeard, Casanova, vampires and the Wizard of Oz intermingle with Cinderella, Rumpelstiltskin, the Three Little Pigs, Little Red Riding Hood, the Three Bears, Snow White and Sleeping Beauty – “There’ll be a spinning wheel at the bottom of all this, you mark my words.”

As the witches set off to right the wrongs of the world, they learn about the structure of stories: “Three was an important number for stories. Three wishes, three princes, three billy goats, three guesses… three witches. The maiden, the mother and the… other one. That was one of the oldest stories of all.” Naturally, not all these conventions are true, for example, “The natural size of a coven is one. Witches only get together when they can’t avoid it.” Meanwhile, Nanny Ogg sends postcards home to our Jason, about what it’s like to be abroad or in foreign parts (where they do odd things like ‘drink fizzy wine out of ladies’ boots’) and obviously the structure and convention of writing postcards is its own artform – sadly, practically lost in 2023.

Granny Weatherwax dislikes stories because she thinks they are unnatural, and they try to make people conform. “You get too involved with stories, you get confused. You don’t know what’s really real and what isn’t. And they get you in the end. They send you weird in the head. I don’t like stories. They’re not real. I don’t like things that ain’t real.” She explains the laissez-faire approach to life. “You can’t go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it’s just a cage.” One could contend that she (and by association Pratchett) is arguing against interventional socialism. “No more stories. No more godmothers. Just people, deciding for themselves. For good or bad. Right or wrong.” Or one could just enjoy it as a right rollicking story of witches abroad.

Friday Five: Books Read in January

1. The Chimney Sweeper's Boy by Barbara Vine (Viking) - When Gerald Candless, a critically acclaimed author dies, his daughter, Sarah, is asked to write a memoir of her beloved father. As she starts to research his childhood and origins – i.e. his life before she was born – she soon discovers multiple discrepancies in the narrative. There follows a domestic investigation into family secrets that might make a man change his name and adopt an entirely new persona. The secrets are often to cover historic scandals, such as illegitimacy, unwed mothers, class distinctions and homosexuality, which would not raise an eyebrow today. Like PD James or Robert Goddard, Barbara Vine writes literary suspense novels where the characters are more engaging the plot, and the themes are apparent from the start. Rather than racing to the end to find out whodunnit, the reader spends time with the characters wondering how they feel and what they are going to do about it.
2. Treacle Walker by Alan Garner (4th Estate) - This short and pithy fantasy was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. Using the language of folklore and myth, it imbues trees, birds, stones and bogs with specific meanings, as linguistic word play heightens the fairytale elements of the power of nature and the land. Young Joe, trying to make sense of his world, meets the rag and bone man, Treacle Walker, who leads him through mirror worlds and comics that come alive with characters such as Stonehenge Kit, the Ancient Brit, who fights Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and his chums the Brit Bashers. Hiding behind antiquated and poetically nonsensical language that calls to mind Dylan Thomas, Gertrude Stein, Roald Dahl and Lewis Carol, Garner explores the world of modern politics, environmental crises and whether or not to 'correct' neurodiversity with medication. For a short work, it has received a lot of attention with very mixed reviews - many American critics found it 'boring', 'not easy or accessible' and are frustrated by its lack of linear narrative, which is like catnip to me.
3. Eric by Terry Pratchett (Gollanz) - When feeling down or overwhelmed, I find Terry Pratchett reliable in cheering me up and relaxing me. Of course I read the books in order, but for some reason I missed this one out - it may be the fact that the title consisted of the crossed out Faust replaced by the name Eric. Eric is a teenage boy who is seeking world domination, and intimate relations with beautiful women. He manages to hack into the demon world (full of endless meetings, memos and policy statements) but unfortunately for him, he summons up the ineffective Rincewind (last seen in Sourcery). It's a welcome return from the hapless chap and his savage but loyal luggage. Rincewind still has glaring gaps in his knowledge (quantum mechanics are 'people who repair quantums, I suppose') but he is still making valiant attempts to save humanity and, more importantly, stay alive. Chortles aplenty.
4. The Diversity Gap by Bethaney B. Wilkinson (Harper Collins Leadership) - The subtitle of this book is Where good intentions meet true cultural change, where the diversity in question is mainly race-related. It offers suggestions of how to make meaningful progress rather than simply ticking boxes or attempting to improve the public image. These things take time, involve actually listening to people, welcoming all opinions (especially uncomfortable ones), believing in the experience  and perception of others, paying people for their 'diversity leadership' (informal as well as formal), and sharing power. The last one seems particularly difficult to accomplish as leadership roles tend to be filled by the dominant cultural vision who want to hoard the power of decision-making to themselves and conduct projects their way, claiming it as a kind of perfectionism as if that were a good thing. The author uses corporate jargon and marketing speak, and repeats phrases immediately in bold as if they were giving a TED talk for the hard of understanding. Despite this being extremely off-putting, they do make some good points. “If we focus on questions related to diversifying teams, but fail to ask questions about sharing power, we miss the mark.”
5. Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton (Granta) - Eleanor Catton was the youngest winner of the Booker Prize with the longest book in 2013 (The Luminaries). She clearly has talent, and she displays it again here in Birnam Wood. It's quite a lengthy novel (423 pages) and there is a lot of exposition, with the balance too much in favour of tell rather than show. Birnam Wood is the name of a renegade group who want to take back the land for common ownership and guerrilla gardening. The members make strange bedfellows with a billionaire who made his money in drone technology and says he wants to build a doomsday bunker but will let them use the land above ground and even finance their project. One former member of the group, feeling jilted by the organisation in its current form and desperate to make a name for himself in investigative journalism, decides to dig a little deeper. Of course there are Shakespearean parallels - powerful ambition is ultimately destructive, there is an integral struggle over whether it is better to be right or rich, innocent casualties accumulate, and 'Birnam Wood was going to a better form of camouflage than he had ever dreamed'. None of this should be a spoiler, unless you've never read/ seen/ heard of Macbeth, in which case, it's a spoiler for that too. Lengthy debates about patriarchy, economics, nationalism, identity politics, intersectionality and capitalism - 'Didn’t we already solve that one?' - are reminiscent of those earnest down-the-pub conversations we used to have as students. Despite the cleverly-designed cover, not everything is black and white. 
6. A Bird in the Hand by Ann Cleeves (Pan Books) - The author of the books on which the series Vera and Shetland are based, Ann Cleeves wrote the first in this George and Molly Palmer-Jones series in 1986. The couple in question are retired, happy to travel the British Isles birdwatching, and solving the murders which invariably occur. George used to work at the Home Office (doing secret business), is good with details and has bouts of depression; Molly is a retired social worker who is good at listening and brings out the best in people. Naturally, they make a great couple. Both are restless with their current life and enjoy a new challenge. When a birdwatcher is found dead on a marsh with his head bashed in and his binoculars still around his neck, it is a great surprise to everyone in the small community because everyone loved him. Or did they? Of course, they didn’t, as this is an old-style mystery and secrets soon come to light complete with multiple suspects, red herrings, precise timings of the murder, poison pen letters, and suspicious alibis. 
7. Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (Canongate) - This is not a book about trout. It is a cult classic that is part commentary on American society, part surreal absurdism, and part hallucinogenic travel memoir where the pictures from the trip (in every sense of the word) are not yet developed. First published in 1967, the book is whimsical in the way that it captures a moment in time, referring to undeveloped photographs as "in suspension now like seeds in a package." Short chapters, oddly specific similes and a total disregard for character development or narrative arc, mark it as a work of post-modernism that deconstructs itself, talks about its own front cover, writes and receives letters and is an item for sale at The Cleveland Wrecking Yard where it is sold by the foot length. Brautigan is the slightly more obscure favourite of the boys in college who also read Kerouac, Kesey , Burroughs and Vonnegut, which should indicate to a potential reader whether they will like him or not. 
8. The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith (W.W. Norton & Company) - This novel was filmed in 2015 (by Todd Haynes) as Carol starring Cate Blanchett as Carol and Rooney Mara as Therese. The fact that I can only remember Cate Blanchett is telling, as Carol is so wholly the focus of the novel that Therese is tantalisingly indistinct. Written in a world-weary glamourous style, it recalls the novels of Fitzgerald, Collette or Nabokov: everything is mentioned, but nothing is understood. Therese begins an infatuation with Carol which leads to a clandestine relationship - is it love, or is the much-older Carol toying with her affections to discard her like a plaything? As a set designer, Therese should be used to miniature worlds and deceptive appearances, yet she seems drawn into the dream as though Carol had some White Witch potential.

It Comes to Us All: Reaper Man

Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett

Corgi Books

Pp. 287

Reaper Man is the eleventh Discworld novel and fleshes out the character of Death, as it were. In this adventure, Death’s time is running out; things aren’t dying the way they should be, which interrupts the fabric of existence; and everything is “filling up the world with life force.” Windle Poons is the oldest wizard in the world, and he is supposed to die, but Death doesn’t show up to collect him, so he doesn’t. Instead, he becomes a member of the Fresh Start Club, a dead rights activism group led by Reg Shoe and comprising other undead folk, such as a vampire and his wife who is desperately trying to conform to stereotype; including wearing certain clothes and speaking with a strong Eastern European accent. We also encounter Ludmilla, a werewolf who changes from woman to dog at full moon, a male dog, Lupine, who changes to human form at the same time, and a bogeyman called Schleppel who likes to lurk behind doors, so much so that he carries his own with him.

Meanwhile, oblivious to all the chaos, Death assumes the mantle of Bill Door and finds work at Miss Flitworth’s farm as an actual reaper man, helping with the harvest, leading to an extended gag about a scythe vs a Combination Harvester. As his time runs out both literally and metaphorically through a sort of egg-timer/ hour glass, he attempts to fit in with the villagers, drinking beer and playing darts. “It was amazing how many friends you could make by being bad at things, provided you were bad enough to be funny.” He is not used to living, which he finds odd, but also confronting. “Was that what it was really like to be alive? The feeling of darkness dragging you forward? How could they live with it? And yet they did, and even seemed to find enjoyment in it, when surely the only sensible course would be to despair.”

Delightful cameo appearances and side swipes at conventional wisdom, recall a fantasy Dickens. Mrs Cake is a clairvoyant who is able to answer questions before people have asked them – they still have to ask them anyway. The faculty wizards at the Unseen University get all sorts of things muddles, which makes for moments of humour, for example, when the Archdeacon (Ridcully) suggests that an RSVP is requested to an invitation, the Bursar exclaims, “Oh, good, I like sherry.” Ridcully himself is “simple-minded. This doesn’t mean stupid. It just meant that he could only think properly about things if he cut away all the complicated bits around the edges.”

The plot is suitably fanciful as evil snow globes hatch into shopping trolleys that converge on places, operating like worker ants or bees around a queen. This might or might not be the case; it is difficult to know for sure. As with all of Terry Pratchett’s work, there is a comically reverent tone to the rituals of human life. He refers to belief as an entity that “sloshes around in the firmament like lumps of clay spiralling into a potter’s wheel” seeking to attach itself to things, such as gods and icons.

Despite all this absurdity and hilarity, there is a touching homily on the nature and meaning of life. “No one is finally dead until the ripples they cause in the world die away – until the clock he wound up winds down, until the wine she has made has finished its ferment, until the crop they planted is harvested. The span of someone’s life, they say, is only the core of their actual existence.” Terry Pratchett is comfort reading for a variety of reasons: his turn of phrase; his ridiculous characters; his twinkling humour and his gentle satire, but above all it is his strong moral compass that truly points the way and keeps his readers coming back.