Small Gods

"He was, yes, although he wasn’t an atheist in the Dawkins sense. He wasn’t somebody who went out and campaigned, for he always said he was quite fond of the Church of England in the way it represented the English character. He contributed towards the repair of the local church roof in his village. So he understood the role that the church played in community, but he awlways saw a difference between that small scale thing—having something comforting to believe in—and the huge systems that control people. He described himself as a humanist, and was a member of the Humanist Society and had a humanist funeral. But he was always clear that the ‘beard in the sky’ was a distraction. Whatever else affected our lives, it wasn’t that. Small Gods is about how pure faith can be warped by fundamentalism and dogma. How powerful people use religion to control people who don’t have power. It’s the first of the Discworld books that really has something to say. It’s very disconnected from the other Discworld narratives. There’s a wonderful, typically Pratchett-y twist in that, in this religion, they believe the world is round—a reversal of classic Flat Earth-dogma, because they do live in a flat world but their religion insists that the world is round and tries to stamp out the movement of people who correctly assert that it’s a flat planet on the back of elephants on the back of a turtle. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . It’s about a character who hears the voice of God, but the voice of God comes from a tortoise, because the god tried to turn himself into a flaming ball to visit somebody, and realised that he had no power because no one truly believed in him—all he could manage was to be a tortoise. There is only one person in the entire world who believes in him. This brings the power of faith and the power of belief into the Discworld books; that is, if you believe in something, it happens, which is why things in this world tend to conform to stories, to what the story expects you to do. Force of belief creates a person, and then that person exists as a real person and becomes a character with thoughts and feelings—that’s another book, well, several other books. Small Gods plays with this idea that religion controls us, and religion is controlled by powerful people who have no real interest in the good of mankind or in the wishes of their particular beard in the sky. All they are doing is using fear to control people. It’s not as down on religion as you might think. What it’s actually down on is dogma and fundamentalism. It’s actually very pro-faith. The main character, Brutha, is seen as a very pure and lovely thing. And once he understands he can move outside of the constraints of these rules and explore his faith in other ways, then that becomes something powerful and useful and worthy, not something controlling and bad. The way Terry came up with this story is very Pratchett. He had just brought his own tortoise out of hibernation and wanted to write a book about a tortoise. He started to research tortoises and came upon an old Greek legend of how an eagle had dropped a tortoise on the head of a priest, who died. Well, Terry started thinking: it seems too much of a coincidence that, of all the rocky ground in Greece, the tortoise would happen to land on a person. It must have been on purpose. Okay, the tortoise was conscious and was in control of the eagle. Why would the tortoise want to kill somebody? Well, nobody hates priests more than God, so the tortoise must be a god. You can spot the point in the logic where other people wouldn’t have gone in this direction. This was the first of his books that was really powerful. Before they had been clever and arch and delightful and funny and wise, but they hadn’t been powerful in the way Small Gods is powerful. It opens up another direction in how he thinks and writes."

"I absolutely love this book because it depicts a push-and-pull situation. In Discworld , Pratchett has set up a world where the power of faith is something that humans have but don’t fully understand, and it can literally create things. So the gods in Discworld are a function of the strength of the belief of their followers. This is a beautiful, crazy concept, and Discworld is full of these beautiful, crazy concepts. And yet, it’s not that farfetched, because when you have a particular format in which you squeeze your idea of deity, the larger the church or the religion, the more you are able to continue to perpetuate and enforce it. So it’s not coming out of nowhere. What we have in Small Gods is a situation where the church has continued as an edifice, but doesn’t necessarily believe in the god around which it has structured itself. But there’s one young novice who truly does believe that this god exists, and has the opportunity to encounter this god. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . The god is not a pleasant entity; he’s small and petty-minded, and it’s funny: this is his personality, you can’t even argue that he’s like this because the believers’ faith in him is not strong enough. Even when the god eventually acquires more power, he has the same personality; he’s learned to appreciate the novice but hasn’t evolved as an individual, so to speak. You begin to understand that the difference between a small god and a god of all that power lies with the people who mediate that god to the real world, and who are responsible for the inquisitions and the services and the rituals—especially the rituals, because of the life thresholds things, like birth, death, marriage, sickness, and so on. Most religions have rituals around those essential areas of our lives, and that has a lot of power. Another interesting thing that Pratchett is saying is that while religion centers around the questions of whether or not this god exists and whether or not this god is benevolent, there’s also the structure of the religion itself—in terms of what role humans play in it and how these humans behave towards other humans. That is the epiphany that the novice has to have. Yes it’s nice that he discovered his god was real, and that, even though he had to come to terms with his god’s personality, he didn’t just fling up his hands and say, ‘if you’re like that, I can’t believe in you anymore.’ He realizes his responsibility in being the person who mediates the presence of the god to the people around him. I did not study an aspect of sociology of religion that allows me to critique these books in that light, but I think these books are very good at examining different aspects of how human beings encounter the concept of religion, how they encounter the concept of divinity, and how we deal with having our universe upended. These can be three separate things, but sometimes they all happen together. I like to see that level of maturity in works. You come across quite a few books, especially in the fantasy genre, where the gods are present, they have very set duties and personalities, they may battle each other, but there’s no real concern or conflict in how the people are dealing with the god. It’s almost as if they’re just dealing with an exceptionally powerful leader. It almost removes that sense of additional—I don’t even quite know what to call it. Complexity? Depth? Nuance? To go back to Narnia; Aslan is very present and I would say that may be part of the function of Lewis starting to work through and develop things and so forth. But even aspects like Susan’s disbelief, or Edmund’s betrayals, or Eustace being a nasty person who has to get over himself, are fascinating things to consider, because Aslan is present and dealing with them in a way where he brings them truth. There’s even a point where Lucy—who is portrayed almost as his favorite, but Aslan still doesn’t let her off the hook—when she eavesdrops on a friend’s conversation, and it was something that she shouldn’t have done, and she looks to Aslan to say, ‘I understand.’ Instead, he says: ‘You’ve ruined your friendship by doing this.’ There’s no apology, no softening. He lets her know it’s a problem. It’s going to be hard. That openness and honesty is showing you the universe as it is. We all go through life with our own biases and filters and veils that allow us not to look too closely at certain things that make us uncomfortable. The books that impress me with how they portray deity are precisely the ones where some kind of truth has to be faced. Maybe the not-god is secondary in bringing it about, like in Flatland , where the epiphany becomes independent of the sphere, who’s not really a deity, or in Small Gods , where the small god has a terrible personality and his novice ends up being in some ways better than him. But the process remains the same: it’s facing reality to come to terms with a reality that is not the one you would have previously accepted."