Good Omens

I’ll start by saying R.I.P. Terry Pratchett, who passed away as I was finishing this book. It’s cliché to say it, but his writing will undoubtedly tickle readers in the future as it tickled me, and in that sense he lives on. Here he teamed up with Neil Gaiman at a time when they weren’t that well known to write “Good Omens, The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch”, and the result was a very humorous re-imagining of the apocalypse.

In this version, God and the Devil are mostly in the background, but have their agents Aziraphale and Crowley on Earth representing them. The two have been around each other so much, however, that they’ve grown somewhat friendly and understanding of one another, and indeed, there show more is some goodness in Crowley, and edge to Aziraphale, and both would prefer to avoid the coming Armageddon. 17th century witch Agnes Nutter has written cryptic prophecies about it and her book has been passed down to family members through the centuries, ending with Anathema Device. As she predicts, the Antichrist is born right on time for the millennium, but he’s misplaced in a baby mix-up and thus brought up to the age of 11 as a normal kid, with normal friends. However, his destiny nears, and as it does, so do the four horseman (slash bikers) War, Famine, Death, and Pollution (the latter a substitute for Pestilence, who retired after the discovery of Penicillin), who were my favorite characters. The Antichrist (slash little boy) begins imagining what he could make of a world wiped clean and re-started, and his powers summon Atlantis, aliens, Tibetan hole diggers, and general chaos.

The book is madcap fun, with satire and clever jabs at society and the world, and I suppose religion too, but never in a mean-spirited way, despite the mockery. I also appreciated the bits of wisdom and profundity that are occasionally slipped in.

Quotes:
On heaven and hell:
“That was what some humans found hard to understand. Hell wasn’t a major reservoir of evil, any more than Heaven, in Crowley’s opinion, was a fountain of goodness; they were just sides in the great cosmic chess game. Where you found the real McCoy, the real grace and the real heart-stopping evil, was right inside the human mind.”

On indifference to evil:
“No one paid any attention to them. Perhaps they saw nothing at all. Perhaps they saw what their minds were instructed to see, because the human brain is not equipped to see War, Famine, Pollution, and Death when they don’t want to be seen, and has got so good at not seeing that it often manages to not see them even when they abound on every side.”

And this, from the Antichrist:
“If I was in charge, I’d try makin’ people live a lot longer, like ole Methusaleh. It’d be a lot more interestin’ and they might start thinkin’ about the sort of things they’re doing to all the environment and ecology, because they’ll still be around in a hundred years’ time.”

On love:
“Newt had indeed been harboring certain thoughts about Anathema; not just harboring them, in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint and scraping the barnacles off their bottom.”

On the past, and future:
“If you want to imagine the future, imagine a boy and his dog and his friends. And a summer that never ends.”

Finally this, the random connection to the last book I’ve read – there always seems to be one, try it yourself sometime – in this case, the last book was ‘The Lives of the Artists’ by Giorgio Vasari, and the connection is Leonard da Vinci. Here in a footnote he comments on the cartoon for Mona Lisa being superior to the final painting:
“’I got her bloody smile right in the roughs,’ he told Crowley, sipping cold wine in the lunchtime sun, ‘but it went all over the place when I painted it. Her husband had a few things to say about it when I delivered it, but, like I tell him, Signor del Giocondo, apart from you, who’s going to see it?’” show less

Having been generously given a copy and since there's a mini-series and all, I finally read the book. Clearly, Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman had a fantastic time writing this funny novel about the apocalypse. There are an angel and a demon who have become something approaching friends after a few millennia of being co-workers of a sort, each assigned to the same task of influencing humans. There's a socially awkward witch finder, who meets an actual witch and falls in love. And there's the Antichrist, who having been accidentally given to the wrong family, heads up a small gang who specialize in annoying the vicar and in generally wholesome hijinks.

Good Omens is fun. It isn't deep or important or breaking new ground, but it is a show more solidly told story with some very funny sentences here and there. It's certainly dated, but in the kind of way that adds to it's charms. show less

i totally get why people like this so much, and maybe should stop rating books that objectively just aren't for me. this is funny and well written, and probably really smart (if i knew enough about armageddon and revelations to know what i'm sure were references), but mostly just not for me. i did enjoy the first third or so but then it could hardly keep my attention, although i still did find some bits humorous throughout. i found that other than the humor (and the footnotes! i loved that there are footnotes in this!) i didn't find it terribly interesting or saying anything new, but maybe that's also because it's older? this was my first pratchett and i think my first or maybe my second gaiman, and i would read either of them again, if show more i ever get more turned on to fantasy. i think, though, that it's just not my thing. but it would seem like this is probably one of the better examples of what fantasy can do. show less

This book doesn't have you fall into the story so much as saunter vaguely into it until you look up and wonder where all the time went and is it really dark outside? Prachett and Gaiman are excellent craftsmen who have created a story and a world which I loved being able to inhabit for an hour at a time. And of course, the characters are ones which someone are able to be so humanly relatable despite being anything but.

I love me a book that can seamlessly fuse together witty humor and dad jokes!

It’s probably that I’m much more familiar with Terry Pratchett than with Neil Gaiman that I felt like all Good Omens needed was for Death to speak in a different font for the book to perfectly fit into the Discworld series. It was hard to decipher Gaiman’s voice (other than the maggots, of course), though this may speak more to the creative process employed, since the authors are well known for stating that by the final edits neither could tell which lines were written by whom.

Good Omens is hilarious, clever, and completely deserving of its cult status. As someone who was not raised in the Christian faith, I’m sure some of the religion-based jokes went show more right over my head, and if they did it wasn’t obvious and did not isolate me from the humor or plot at all. My singular issue with the novel is that the adolescent Antichrist and his gang were written way too young for their age of eleven. Otherwise, this book is nearly perfect and has aged quite well. show less

This collaboration by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is farcical and fun. It employs angels and demons (and Biblical references) to poke fun at human nature. Agnes Nutter, witch, produced a book of prophesy back in the 17th century, and the angel Aziraphale and demon Crowley are trying to prevent the Armageddon she prophesized. In the process, they lose track of the Antichrist (oopsie!) when he was a child and must track him down. As part of the humor, it satirizes apocalyptic fiction and the ability (or lack thereof) to distinguish right from wrong. The children and dog add an element of playfulness. I read this book while looking for a book about an “angel.” Most books I found were paranormal romance, which is not my thing. I was show more pleasantly surprised to find this one, and by how much I enjoyed it. show less

Christ, what a wonderful book. It's hard to know where Gaiman ends and Pratchett begins, but that is what is so telling about both of their crafts. Good Omens is a riot, thought-provoking, heartening, and hilarious.