Small Gods turns the story of Galileo and the Inquisition upside down: scientists know the Discworld is a flat disc on the back of a turtle swimming through space, but in Omnia, they hold the bigoted belief that it is a sphere orbiting the sun. This is Pratchett at his best: expansive and lucid, taking one of the greatest ideas in western thought (it is, as his fans will know, almost an exact quote from Plato’s Republic) and having a bit of fun with it. What can we know of reality? For all we see of the true nature of existence is, shall we say, no more than bewildering and amusing shadows cast upon the inner wall of the cave by the unseen blinding light of absolute truth, from which we may or may not deduce some glimmer of veracity, and we as troglodyte seekers of wisdom can only lift our voices to the unseen and say, humbly, ‘Go on, do Deformed Rabbit. “Life in this world, he said, is, as it were, a sojourn in a cave. Thus a philosopher expounds a theory of knowledge remarkably similar to that of the ancient Greek thinker Plato, except with a punchline: In Small Gods he takes delight in bringing the hifalutin stuff of theology and cosmology down to earth with self-conscious silliness. This is the kind of joke Pratchett enjoys. If he did achieve monk status, he would be called Brother Brutha. That’s why he’s always working in the vegetable garden. Brutha, the young novice monk who finds him in a vegetable garden and is the only person who can hear him speak, is unpromising, apparently stupid, undoubtedly slow (the difference will become apparent), and not expected to progress beyond novicehood. But neither god nor prophet cuts an impressive figure. He speaks to the young man who will become his prophet. A god – in fact the one Omnians worship, Om himself – has fallen to earth. In the theocratic state of Omnia, isolated in a barren desert on the Discworld, a miracle has happened. The fall of Ephebe is one of the most dramatic moments in Small Gods, the 13th Discworld novel, which furious fans suggested I should read.
See, I have now read an entire Pratchett book.
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