It feels appropriate (if unplanned) to publish this review on the sad fourth anniversary of Sir Terry’s untimely death.

By this point in the Discworld saga, he was really hitting the peak of his powers. This was a writer who is really confident with his material, able to tackle large themes and ready to take risks. And for any writer religion is arguably the biggest risk – you are always going to upset someone. Small Gods is a fascinating discussion of the nature of divinity. That makes it sounds very serious, but that was the author’s genius – to write about serious themes in a very funny way.

The novel is set in Omnia, a kingdom in the continent of Klatch, new to Discworld at this point I believe, and bearing an uncanny resemblance to a medieval Catholic country in the grip of a frenzied search for any trace of heresy. Pratchett has given Om a far-eastern name, and mixes up his religious references freely, but the use of torture by the Quisition to enforce religious conformity and stamp out free thinking, has only one true origin. In Omnia religion has become a distorted version of itself, with torture and fear being its dominant characteristic. In these circumstances true belief in the God Om himself has begun to wither, so much so that the God Om finds himself reincarnated in the body of a tortoise. It seems he is destined to return to the world of once great but now Small Gods who exist on the borders of reality, desperate for believers from whom they derive their existence.

By a million to one chance, and therefore a literary certainty, Om in his tortoise form encounters the novice Brutha, the only remaining true believer in Omnia. Brutha’s idetic memory is used Vorbis, the head of the ExQuisition, to memorise the way through a labyrinth used to guard the library of Ephebe. Vorbis is one of Pratchett’s scariest monsters, a psychopath so controlled and uncaring that he is able to retain his position at the head of the Omnian church by fear alone. An underground movement, reminiscent of the early Christian church, survives in secret, passing its belief in the Disc-shape of the word through its slogan “The Turtle Moves”. The scene is set for a clash of beliefs in which someone is going to die. Guessing who isn’t a challenge, but the journey – in this case a physical journey through the desert – is where the transformation of Brutha from a menial drudge to a prophet occurs.

As always with Pratchett his wit and wisdom shines through. Here he is on religious repression, for example:

“Fear is a strange soil. It grows obedience like corn, which grow in straight lines to make weeding easier. But sometimes it grows the potatoes of defiance, which flourish underground.”

or here on the miracle of our existence:

“Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…”

Sir Terry’s death was such a loss, but he left us a wonderful collection of novels that are a fine legacy.