Libraries in fiction: Small Gods

“Go away. Fill yourself. And be back by sunset.”

“Er. Even the Library?” said Brutha.

“Ah? Yes, the Library. The Library that they have here. Of course. Crammed with useless and dangerous and evil knowledge. I can see it in my mind, Brutha. Can you imagine that?”

“No, Lord Vorbis.”

“Your innocence is your shield, Brutha. No. By all means go to the Library. I have no fear of any effect on you.”

In the last of this series, Daniel Gooding takes us to the Library of Ephebe to meet Brutha and Didactylos in Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods.

Those who are already familiar with the Discworld series will no doubt be expecting an article about the library of Unseen University, and its various magical properties:

“…a whole gallery of unwritten books – books that would have been written if the author hadn’t been eaten by an alligator around chapter 1, and so on. Atlases of imaginary places. Dictionaries of illusory words. Spotters’ guides to invisible things. Wild thesauri in the Lost Reading Room.”

But this book is set far away from Ankh-Morpork, and although the infamous Librarian of the Unseen University Library does make a brief cameo towards the end, it is to the Library of Ephebe that we come to this month.

Ephebe is the Discworld equivalent of ­Ancient Greece, a country where philosophers are 10 a penny and everyone, it seems, is writing, or has written a book. Brutha, the slow-witted hero of our story, is a monk from the land of Omnia, where people live their lives according to the teachings of one book (The Book of Om), which is held to be the ultimate and only truth. In the Library of Ephebe there are four or five hundred volumes, many of which are scrolls “to save their readers the fatigue of having to call a slave every time they wanted a page turned,” each one of them based on speculation or guesswork. Didactylos, the apparent proprietor of the Library of Ephebe, is one of these philosophers, who makes a meagre living with his more technically-minded nephew Urn from a stall outside the Library (or LIBRVM), selling proverbs such as “It’s a funny old world”, and “It’s a wise crow that knows which way the camel points.”

Brutha and Didactylos are complete opposites in character, although both live their lives by the written word: while Brutha is blind in his devotion to Om, Didactylos is literally blind, using a system of carved planks to help him find his way around the library; Brutha clings to the absolute certainty of Omnianism, while Didactylos maintains that “Not being certain is what being a philosopher is all about”; and while Didactylos’s brain seethes and bubbles “like a potful of electric eels on full boil”, Brutha’s mind is like a data repository; though unable to read or write, he has a photographic memory which allows him to store everything he sees with total recall, although without the ability to measure the value of any of this information.

The Library of Ephebe is clearly based on the famous library of Alexandria, and it comes as little surprise when it eventually goes up in flames. As the building burns, along with its hundreds of scrolls, the only way to save the knowledge contained in them is for Brutha to store the contents of the scrolls in his capacious memory like a one-man digitisation machine:

“Brutha looked at a scroll full of maps. He shut his eyes. For a moment the jagged outline glowed against the inside of his eyelids, and then he felt them settle into his mind. They were still there somewhere – he could bring them back at any time. Urn unrolled another scroll. Pictures of animals. This one, drawings of plants and lots of writing. This one, just writing. This one, triangles and things. They settled down in his memory. After a while, he wasn’t even aware of the scrolls unscrolling. He just had to keep looking.”

By the time of Brutha’s death 100 years later, the Library of Ephebe has been rebuilt to become the largest non-magical library in the world, with visitors coming from all over the Disc to consults its collection of 1,283 religious books, “each one – according to itself – the only book any man need ever read.” By working together, Brutha and Didactylos remind us that the value of libraries is not just in providing access to information, but also the means to question and interrogate it. Recent scandals in politics and social media have shown us the dangers in accepting readily-presented facts as truth, and it is more important now than ever to always investigate and find out the full story, and to beware the figures in authority who talk of “fake news” and “useless, evil knowledge.” But to quote the philosopher Didactylos: “Still, it does you good to laugh.”