Kay's Bookshelf

I have to start by saying that, while I am a devout Pratchett fan, I liked this book a lot more than I thought I would. Which means that this will be one of those not exactly reviews but me jotting down random things about the book (whenever I find a book I like a lot I sort of lose my head and cannot talk about it like I should). Oh well. Since I am here I might as well give it a try :)

Let’s start with the (very colorful) cast of characters, from powerful gods to puny tortoises. Brutha is, at first, a simple minded guy, whose only interesting trait was the fact that he never forgot anything. He doesn’t know how to read or write, but he is as happy as can be with his monastic life. However, forced by the circumstances, his horizons enlarge, and I liked very much the moment he started thinking for himself instead of blindly believing the precepts of the city he lived in. He is essentially a good guy, never hesitating to lend a hand to his worst enemy if need arose, and I rooted for him all throughout. Om is also an interesting character since he is used to being a Great and powerful God, worshipped by many, and has a bit of trouble adjusting to his new condition. His destiny is now tied to Brutha’s and is interesting to notice how Om’s way of thinking becomes influenced by him (he even stops to ask himself whether it’s fair for a god to kill people or not, a thing he used to take for granted). There are a lot more characters (the ship captain, the inquisitors, various soldiers, lots of philosophers, a Tyrant, minuscule gods as well as powerful ones, an inventor, an anchorite in the desert, and many many more), but I will leave the reader the pleasure of discovering them him/herself.

The two cities where most of the action takes place are quite interesting to observe in light of their comparison with their “Roundworld” counterparts. We have the city/Kingdom of Omnia, that makes one think of, for example, 16th century Rome (and the Omnian Cenobiarch being the counterpart of the Pope). In both there is a belief in one God Almighty, everything else being considered a blasphemy and the guilty party was then tortured by the Quisition (or its real-world counterpart, the Inquisition). Vorbis is the head of the said organisation, just as a Grand Inquisitor was the leader in our own world. Not to mention that the most important secret organisation of Omnia in that time was one that opposed the official theory of the planet being a sphere, fighting for their idea that their world is in reality a disc placed on the backs of four elephants who stand on the back of a turtle that swims slowly through space (which, by the way, it actually is). Their codephrase is “The Turtle moves”, making one think of Galileo Galilei’s famous alleged remark, “And yet it moves!” (while also bringing to mind the dilemma of centuries ago when people tried to decide whether the world was flat or not). Not to mention that the Omnian armies conquer everything in sight, in the name of their true faith (16th century Spain anyone?)

As for Ephebe, I am quite certain it is a reference to Athens of antiquity. The land is teeming with philosophers, all of them discussing important questions like “Does a falling tree in the forest make a sound when there is no one to hear?”, while only now and then having an actually useful idea. Their leader is called a Tyrant, although he is chosen by very democratic means. Everyone lives peacefully, and most of them are polytheist (just like people in Athens were). Speaking of which, my favorite god of theirs (besides Fedecks the Messenger of the Gods) is Patina the Goddess of Wisdom, as described in this quote:

Gods became what people believed they ought to be. So the Goddess of Wisdom carried a penguin. It could have happened to any god. It should have been an owl. Everyone knew that. But one bad sculptor who had only ever had an owl described to him makes a mess of a statue, belief steps in, next thing you know the Goddess of Wisdom is lumbered with a bird that wears evening dress the whole time and smells of fish.

A hint at Athena if I’ve ever seen one :)

I loved the fact that there are many irreverent references to various philosophers/writers — and I am fairly certain I didn’t get them all either. For example it is said that Aeschylus died hit on the head by a turtle dropped by an eagle (and there’s a turtle-dropping eagle featured in this story too). Sartre’s “Hell is other people” is mentioned in passing. Ephebe, the city of philosophers (one of them named Aristocrates), is filled with them and their strange ideas — let us consider for example Legibus, who jumped out of his bath ’cause he had “this splendid idea for moving the world around” using a lever (yup, the same idea Archimedes had — “Give me a place to stand on, and I will move the Earth.“). Then there’s Dydactilos who lived in a barrel (like Diogenes), who said “pray don’t touch my circles” when faced with soldiers, and who also mentions the idea that life is just shadows on a wall. Add to that his statement that “There’s no point in believing in things that exist.[...] They just are.” (an oblique reference to Kierkegaard) and you’ll begin to get a taste of the way the book feels (parts of it at least).

Humor aside, there is also some unexpected depth to the book. It mostly deals with god(s) and belief, and some parts really got me thinking. One of the ideas I have found worth mentioning is this: “People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure.“. God is not the same as the rituals in his honour, but people can forget that at times. In Brutha’s words, “Like…like a man hitting a donkey with a stick. But people like Vorbis made the stick so good, that’s all the donkey ends up believing in.” (admittedly not a great analogy but one I found to be fitting in the context). There is also the matter of what happens to gods when they run out of believers (“because what gods need is belief“). Om’s very vital power very much depends on the number of believers’ minds available. Speaking of which, only the true believers could hear Om — interesting perhaps as an illustration of Kierkegaardian leap of faith: one had to believe first and get the proof of his conviction later.

Speaking of which, Brutha is at times sort of (more or less vaguely) making me think of Jesus. He has a direct line with the god, for one. He is a rather innocent human being and always tries to do the right thing. There’s also a mention of Brutha’s being tied up on a huge iron turtle, condemned to death, while Didactylos mused about how they left him his loin cloth on (to spare his dignity although they were planning to kill him). Plus, my favorite, there is also a scene where Brutha is discouraged because he has lost track of Om and has stopped hearing his voice, and he thinks he should do something but does not dare; a scene somewhat reminiscent of Jesus in the Gethsemane garden when he too was feeling forsaken and afraid.

What I liked most: My three favorite scenes, in no particular order:

The most visually appealing: the scene where a ship is crashed and destroyed and everyone on it (plus the ship itself) meets Death who sends them on to find what awaits them. “Accompanied by the ghosts of dolphins, the ghost of a ship sailed on…”

Well written: the scene where Om meets an ex-important god in the desert, almost bringing shivers down my spine (perhaps because I can visualise it all so well and feel the small god’s loss):

And there were temples. I, I, me. Such temples as you may dream of. Great pyramid temples that reached to the sky. The glory of. Thousands were sacrificed. Me. To the greater glory.

And there were temples. Me, me, me. Greater glory. Such glory temples as you may dream of. Great pyramid dream temples that reached to the sky. Me, me. Sacrificed. Dream. Thousands were sacrificed. To me the greater sky glory-

Just a funny moment: the one where Brutha first met the God and kept quoting Om’s scriptures at him (“you said this”, “you said that”, while the god seemed to hear mostly everything for the first time)

“Ossory. Ossory,” said the tortoise. “No . . . no . . . can’t say I-”

“He said that you spoke unto him from out of a pillar of flame,” said Brutha.

“Oh, that Ossory,” said the tortoise. “Pillar of flame. Yes.”

“And you dictated to him the Book of Ossory,” said Brutha. “Which contains the Directions, the Gateways, the Abjurations, and the Precepts. One hundred and ninety­three chapters.”

“I don’t think I did all that,” said Om doubtfully. “I’m sure I would have remembered one hundred and ninety-three chapters.”

“What did you say to him, then?”

“As far as I can remember it was ‘Hey, see what I can do!’“ said the tortoise.

What I liked least: While I have very much loved the book on the whole, there were a few tidbits that bothered me a bit at times. For example, after the library, Brutha had “memories of knowledge” from the books he looked at — but he couldn’t read so how did the meaning of them get into his head? (this is addressed by the characters too as being something strange; and yet it bothered me for its sheer lack of logic). Also, the turtle that is Om can sometimes speak to wildlife (usually birds), and I kept wondering how that is since it has been previously established he could only reach his believers (and, of course, the birds couldn’t be that). Perhaps the reason lies in the birds having a simpler mind or something like that :)

Recommend it to? Anyone, particularly those who are fans of British humor. This is the 13-th book set in the Discworld universe but it is almost completely unrelated to the ones before or after so do not be afraid to pick it up :)

See also:
Annotations @ The Annotated Pratchett File (containing lots of details I didn’t manage to notice)

Written by the same author:
Nation
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)

A few more quotes:

“It is all for the glory of Om,” he said. “Trust is our sail, and glory is our destination.”
The captain had had enough. He was unsteady on the subject of religion, but felt fairly confident that after thirty years he knew something about the sea.
“The ocean floor is our destination!” he shouted.
Vorbis shrugged. “I did not say there would not be stops along the way,” he said.

A law the Great God was thinking of proclaiming after he got back into his seat of power:

Thou Shalt Bloody Well Pick up Any Distressed Tortoises and Carry Them Anywhere They Want Unless, And This is Im­portant, You’re an Eagle

Funny but true:

It is a popular fact that nine-tenths of the brain is not used and, like most popular facts, it is wrong. Not even the most stupid Creator would go to the trouble of making the human head carry around several pounds of unnecessary gray goo if its only real purpose was, for example, to serve as a delicacy for certain remote tribesmen in unexplored valleys. It is used. And one of its functions is to make the miraculous seem ordinary and turn the unusual into the usual.

Because if this was not the case, then human beings, faced with the daily wondrousness of everything, would go around wearing big stupid grins, similar to those worn by certain remote tribesmen who occasionally get raided by the authorities and have the contents of their plastic greenhouses very seriously inspected. They’d say “Wow!” a lot. And no one would do much work.

And my favorite:

What have I always believed?

That on the whole, and by and large, if a man lived properly, not according to what any priests said, but according to what seemed decent and honest inside, then it would, at the end, more or less, turn out all right.

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Mau’s greatest worry is that he has no soul (he thinks he has left his “boy soul” on the island and he has never gotten his “man soul”). He has lost his faith in the gods that have allowed the wave to happen. Nevertheless (and despite his age) he is a hero, in the truest sense of the word. He never shirks when there is something that he can do to help others (no matter how unpleasant the task may be). He considers everything and everyone to be his responsibility and tries to do his duty as well as he can. Daphne is also a character I’ve very much liked: her inclination for science and scientific explanations was one of my favorite things in the book. In her own way she was just as much a hero as Mau was (even more so actually if we take into account her sheltered lady-like upbringing).

The alternate world the story takes place in looks very much like our own world years ago (when the British Empire still ruled the seas). The planet is round, Saturn has his rings, Newton has existed, Einstein will exist. There are a lot of small islands, all named after calendar significant dates (including a Mrs. Ethel J. Bundy’s Birthday Island :) ). Mau’s island (a small dot in the “Mothering Sunday” chain) is a haven as yet untouched by civilization (as many islands were at the time, even in our own version of reality), filled with pantaloon birds (noisy birds that throw up their food at times), paper vines (vines like rolled up paper) and tree climbing octopi. A strange and yet delightful world.

Terry Pratchett is one of my favorite authors and has been so for almost a decade. As such, I was thrilled to get to read his latest (non-Discworld) novel, expecting to see it dripping with his British humor, like all his other books. I was surprised to discover this wasn’t the case though: sure, there still are a few jokes here and there, and even a few “Pratchettian” footnotes, but the story was mostly poignant and serious. It speaks of loss and of growing up (both physically and mentally), of surpassing difficulties and creating new realities. A masterpiece that I enjoyed, despite its being not what I expected.

Two quotes:

Somewhere out there, flying to him from the edge of the world, was tomorrow. He had no idea what shape it would be, but he was wary of it. They had food and fire, but that wasn’t enough. You had to find water and food and shelter and a weapon, people said. And they thought that was all you had to have, because they took for granted the most important thing. You had to have a place where you belonged.

and

This was not the time to say “I don’t know.” The brothers had begging, hungry looks, like dogs waiting to be fed. They wanted an answer. It would be nice if it was the right answer, but if it couldn’t be, then any answer would do, because then we would stop being worried…and then his mind caught alight.

That’s what the gods are! An answer that will do! Because there’s food to be caught and babies to be born and life to be lived and so there is no time for big, complicated, and worrying answers! Please give us a simple answer, so that we don’t have to think, because if we think, we might find answers that don’t fit the way we want the world to be.

What I liked most: Lots and lots of things, best summed up in this quote (Mau’s answer when asked whether he would go back to the world before the wave):

“How can I answer you? There is no language. There was a boy called Mau. I see him in my memory, so proud of himself because he was going to be a man. He cried for his family and turned the tears into rage. And if he could, he would say ‘Did not happen!’ and the wave would roll backward and never have been. But there is another boy, and he is called Mau, too, and his head is on fire with new things. What does he say? He was born in the wave, and he knows that the world is round, and he met a ghost girl who is sorry she shot at him. He called himself the little blue hermit crab, scuttling across the sand in search of a new shell, but now he looks at the sky and knows that no shell will ever be big enough, ever. Will you ask him not to be? Any answer will be the wrong one. All I can be is who I am. But sometimes I hear the boy inside crying for his family.”

Especially the metaphor of the blue hermit crab that has left his old shell behind and now can no longer find one large enough because his world is full of questions :)

What I liked least: Predictably enough, the last part of the chapter before last. I did understand, of course, why it had to happen but… I really didn’t want it to end like this :( :(

Recommend it? Absolutely, I have loved it. Read the most part of it in one sitting too :)

Written by the same author:
Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman)
Small Gods

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My absolute favorite characters of them all had to be Crawley and Aziraphale. Both were anything but boring, anything but one-sided (Crawley was definitely not completely bad, Aziraphale had some mischievous sparkles in him too) — I loved that enormously, the fact that they were nothing like what one might expect from a demon, respectively an angel. Agnes Nutter (though dead for about three centuries at the time the story takes place) is a delicious character too (well she did talk really funny — understandably but at times hard to understand), having sort of a twisted sense of humor that I really enjoyed :P

Being a Pratchett fan I must say that the scene with the four Hell’s Angers is sort of recycled from one of his own books (a favorite of mine too, called Thief of Time) — unfortunately I don’t remember that one very well but it was sort of a lot funnier there (or perhaps the idea was new to me :P ), especially with none of them but Death being in the mood for Apocalypse and having to be repeatedly required to come and ride because the Apocalypse has come and it was written they should ride… also one of them, War, had gotten married in between and his wife kept mothering him and insisting he should take care not to catch a cold and such :) :) The part related to the four riders in Good Omens is a bit blander, as the four (well, the three, Death is as delicious as ever though he doesn’t talk very much) don’t have much of a personality, they just do their own thing (provoking wars, making people die of starvation, polluting everything in sight) and are just like “well, okay, at last” when they find out the Apocalypse’s coming.

It’s probably worth noting that Pratchett & Gaiman share the idea (that I also tend to share at times) that man is the most evil of any creature anywhere, managing to think of things (evil things of course) that put even the Devil himself to shame (for example see Crowley’s reaction to the Spanish Inquisition: “He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.“). While the idea is not original, it is sort of interestingly presented:

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
[...]
And just when you’ d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.

What I liked most: The way Famine made a living (so to say, I know he was immortal) before the Apocalypse: writing books that told (young) women how to starve themselves in order to look good. And it worked like a charm. A bit ironic, you know: hundreds of years ago there were people who had nothing to eat so they had no choice but starve; as nowadays that’s no longer an issue (in some parts of the world of course), Famine had to change his approach and make people want to starve themselves to death — and he did. (he also had restaurants that sold food with absolutely no nutritional value but by far my favorite strategy was the first one)

I was also really amused by the two versions of covers available for the book: one (white) listing Neil Gaiman first (“Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett”), the other (black) listing Terry Pratchett first (“Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman”) :P :P

PS The hound from hell (turned Dog) was a really nice touch too :P

What I liked least: Well not actually something I didn’t like but I did not understand what was up with the sword, scales, and crown that War, Famine, respectively Pollution had. Okay, the sword had been Aziraphale’s flaming sword that he had given to Adam and Eve when they were banished from the Garden of Eden, and the scales of Famine must have something to do with weight, measuring weight, losing weight, stuff like that. But… um… what’s up with the Crown? How did Aziraphale’s sword ended up War’s?

Recommend it? Yes, definitely, especially if you are (like me) a Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman fan :)
(it’s sort of amusing how many people complain on the dedicated Amazon customers review board that they have lent this book to a friend and never got it back so they had to buy a new one to re-read it :) )

Also written by Neil Gaiman:
American Gods
The Graveyard Book
Coraline
Neverwhere
Snow, Glass, Apples
Stardust

Also written by Terry Pratchett:
Nation
Small Gods

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