[In the following review of several Discworld books, Feeley laments the longer novels asserting that the stronger works are those where Pratchett practices brevity.]

Terry Pratchett's Small Gods tells of torture, religious repression, death, and the persistence of folly in human affairs. It is an unusual set of themes to come from a writer famous for his delirious comedy, but Pratchett—whatever his reputation as a hip writer of frequently side-splitting humor—has always been a humorist of the most mordant, darkest shade.

His earlier novels, nearly all of which feature death and mayhem in various comic ways, include Reaper Man and Mort, while a third begins by promising to answer the question of what our ancestors would be thinking if they were alive today. (The answer proves to be: “Why is it so dark in here?”) Like Tom Sharpe's novels and the diaries of Adrian Mole, Pratchett's books about the Discworld (which rests upon four elephants standing atop a great turtle; folks get burned for suggesting the world is round) do not enjoy the fanatical popularity here that they do in Britain, which prompts one to wonder whether the failing is ours. Adrian Mole, like Brian Aldiss's novels of the Hand-Reared Boy, may be too English to find a large audience across the Atlantic; but certainly Pratchett should travel as readily as Monty Python.

Small Gods is the story of Om, formerly one of the billions of minuscule deities that swarm invisibly through the Discworld, hoping to be noticed: “Most of them are too small to see and never get worshipped, at least by anything bigger than bacteria, who never say their prayers and don't demand much in the way of miracles.” A great god in his time, commanding the belief of millions, Om has lately fallen into decline: Although he is worshipped by an enormous theocracy, his ranks of actual believers have dwindled to one, a novice monk named Brutha. As a result of this dwindling of assets, Om has found himself incarnated as a tortoise.

The attempts of Brutha (who alone can hear Om's entreaties) and Om to restore the god's fortunes set a great creaking plot into motion, one that is notably funnier for its asides—“This suggested that the Universe had probably been put together in a bit of a rush while the Supreme Being wasn't looking, in the same way that Boy Scouts' Association minutes are done on office photocopiers all over the country”—than for its design. There is a city full of Greek-sounding philosophers, and an Alexandrian-like library, and an Omnian army intent on destroying both, and quite a few things happen. Various important issues (the evils of religious intolerance, the unanticipated applications of pure research) are discussed, rather more earnestly than Pratchett has hitherto done.

The problem with Small Gods is that its plot is complicated without being especially deft, and many tiny scenes exist solely to move stage scenery. Since a fair number of Pratchett's jokes recur from one book to the next, and many of the jokes in this novel are of the running or repeating variety (virtually every character, seeing Om as a tortoise, remarks, “There's good eating on one of those things”), the reader can end up looking for the good lines, like a partygoer digging through a dish of peanuts for the odd cashew.

Pratchett's previous novel (in America, at least) Witches Abroad, reunites Granny Weatherwax, Nanny Ogg, and Magrat Garlick from Wyrd Sisters and sends them on a mission to a distant city after Magrat becomes fairy godmother following the death of the previous incumbent, a witch splendidly named Desiderata. In addition to revealing what witches actually say at a sabbat (“Did everyone bring potato salad?”), the story offers a travelogue across the face of Discworld, where the distinctly unrefined trio must deal not only with the rigors of travel—“More than a couple of hours on a stick and I've gone rigid in the dairy air … That's foreign for bum”—but also with an evil fairy godmother who wishes to use the power of storytelling to impose happy endings upon everyone.

Perhaps because the novel's picaresque structure seems commodious rather than contrived, one reads with less of an obtrusive sense of stage machinery being wheeled into place. Still, Pratchett's taste for complicated climactic scenes remains, so that his novels, rather than coming to a point as much comedy does, tend to blow apart like a firecracker.

If Small Gods and Witches Abroad often seem labored, part of the reason may be their outsized dimensions. The first batch of Pratchett's novels to be published in this country—The Colour of Magic, The Light Fantastic, etc.—ran between 170 and 200 pages in length, traditionally the perfect length for a comic novel (one thinks immediately of those by P. G. Wodehouse). Like everything else in the '80s (the trade deficit, Rush Limbaugh), comic fantasy novels grew bigger without becoming any funnier. The extra hundred pages that Pratchett's recent novels have been carrying weigh heavily upon them; one need only to look to his infrequent short stories (such as “Troll Bridge” in the anthology After the King) or his shorter novels—the trilogy Truckers, Diggers, and Wings, ostensibly for younger readers, is an excellent example—to see how much defter and funnier Pratchett is when he keeps his timing taut.