Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same. They had legends on them like A Present from the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To the World’s Greatest Daddy. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Workspace of pretty much most clusters of employees: Those machines for inflicting escalating levels of pain) that is like the There are many aspects of their workspace (aside, of course, from One ambitious priest named Vorbis, the sort of monomaniacal fanatic who isĪnd with the Average Joes who work for them.Įarly in Small Gods, Pratchett offers a scene in which he describes the palace cellar where Vorbis’s orders for torture are carried out by a group of men called inquisitors. This edition has been published in series with the enormously popular Mort, and includes printed endpapers, a spectacular illustrated slipcase and an image of Great A’Tuin the turtle on the spine.All of the evil stuff in this novel - and there’s a lot of tortureĪnd cruelty, cruelly inflicted - is rooted in organized religion, specifically The cover image depicts Brutha in the style of religious iconography, complete with a somewhat irate tortoise tucked under his arm. Omar Rayyan has once again provided a series of sensitive illustrations which depict the inhabitants of the Disc, including Didactylos and his barrel, and the sinister Exquisitor Vorbis. Byatt describes the author as not only ’splendidly inventive’, but also ’wise and morally complicated’. In her introduction to The Folio Society’s edition of Mort, A. Searing in its satire but always deeply humane, it is packed with Pratchett’s familiar humour and witty footnotes. It was always Terry Pratchett’s approach to examine human nature through the lens of fantasy fiction, and Small Gods, taking on the thorny subjects of organised religion, power and philosophy, is no small triumph. Without a single honestly meant prayer, the gods of the Discworld waste away to nothing, becoming half-heard whispers of temptation in the desert, while humans move on to the next big omniscient deity. The Discworld is ripe with gods – from the impressive inhabitants of Cori Celesti to P’tang-P’tang the newt god, worshipped by a grand total of 51 believers – and all of them need belief to exist. ‘He would be amusing in any form and his spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction’
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