Small Gods

Grabbed this off a used shelf mostly because the cover made me laugh, a god stuck in the body of a tortoise, and had no idea it was book thirteen of a very long series until I looked it up afterward. Turns out it works fine standalone, which I appreciated, since I wasn’t ready to commit to reading forty books to understand one.

The premise is that gods only have power in proportion to how many people genuinely believe in them, not just go through the motions of worship, and the Great God Om has been reduced to a tortoise because he’s down to exactly one true believer, a dim, kind, endlessly literal young monk named Brutha. That setup lets Pratchett do something I wasn’t expecting from what I’d assumed was a comedy fantasy series, an actually careful, fairly generous treatment of the difference between religion as institution and belief as something a person actually holds.

The dialogue between Om and Brutha carries most of the book for me. Om is petty and short-tempered in a way that’s very funny for a supposed deity, and Brutha’s total sincerity plays against it well. I laughed out loud more than once, the running gag about tortoises being good eating never stopped landing, but there’s a real question sitting underneath the jokes about whether the church built around a god actually serves the god at all, or just itself.

If I’ve got a complaint it’s that some of the political maneuvering in the middle section moves faster than the character work can keep up with, a few minor characters get promoted to point-of-view status without quite earning it. Didn’t slow me down much.

Five stars, and now I understand why fourteen different friends have been telling me to read this series for years.