Good Omens

I love Good Omens, which was written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman early in both of their careers.  It's my favorite book.  I discovered Good Omens in college, and I've read it at least once a year since then.  Every now and then I just get in the mood to go revisit Crowley, Aziraphale, Anathema Device, Newton Pulsifer, Adam, and all the rest.  This book remains entertaining and laugh out loud funny no matter how many times I read it.

This post is more of a love letter/recap than a review and will contain intense spoilers.  What follows is everything I love most about this book..

Good Omens begins nearly at the beginning of everything:

It was a nice day.
All the days had been nice.  There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet.

So, that's pretty close to the beginning.  It actually starts as Adam and a newly pregnant Eve are looking for shelter having just been kicked out of the Garden of Eden. A demon and an angel, who will eventually become friends (more or less) discuss what has just transpired in terms of Right and Wrong and Ineffability.

Flash forward to eleven years ago.  We get one of my favorite quotes from the book, which expands on one of Einstein's famous quotes to describe the mysterious ways of God:

God does not play dice with the universe; He plays an ineffable game of His own devising, which might be compared, from the perspective of any of the other players (i.e., everybody), to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poked in a pitch-dark room, with blank cards, for infinite stakes, with a Dealer who won't tell you the rules, and who smiles all the time.

We are quickly introduced to Crowley, an Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.  Crowley was the serpent who tempted Eve all those years ago, but he has since updated his appearance to blend in a bit

Crowley had dark hair and good cheekbones and he was wearing snakeskin shoes, or at least presumably he was wearing shoes, and he could do really weird things with his tongue.

 Crowley is on his way to a meeting with some other demons named Hastur and Ligur.  Upon arrival, they recount the "Deeds of the Day" in a passage that I adore for its commentary on evil in the modern world

Hastur cleared his throat
"I have tempted a priest ," he said. "As he walked down the street and saw the pretty girls in the sun, I put Doubt into his mind.  He would have been a saint, but within a decade we shall have him."
"Nice one," said Crowley, helpfully.
"I have corrupted a politician," said Ligur.  "I let him think a tiny bribe would not hurt.  Within a year we will have him."
They both looked expectantly at Crowley, who gave them a big smile
"I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime."

Hastur and Ligur are unimpressed.  Poor Crowley

What could he tell them?  That twenty thousand people got bloody furious?  That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city?  And that they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever and they took it out on other people?  In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves.  For the rest of the day.  The pass-along effects were incalculable.  Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

I love the implications that humans don't need Hell's direct influence to be evil.  I also love Crowley's efficiency here.  He's thinking like a human, rather than a demon.

With the ritual out of the way, Crowley is given the Antichrist (aka the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness, but Antichrist is shorter).  He's not too happy about this.  In the last 6000 years, he's really come to enjoy his time on Earth, and is finding the 20th century particularly fun.  However, he dutifully takes the Antichrist to a hospital run by Satanist nuns who switch him out with another baby.

The problem is that there are two women giving birth that night, and the Antichrist ends up with the wrong family.  As the book says,

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.

After delivering the baby, Crowley goes to find Aziraphale, an angel who, like Crowley, has been on Earth since the beginning.

Aziraphale.  The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him sort of a friend.

Aziraphale is described thus:

Many people, meeting Aziraphale for the first time, formed three impressions: that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide. Two of these were wrong; Heaven is not in England, whatever certain poets may have thought, and angels are sexless unless they really want to make an effort. But he was intelligent.

The two of them discuss what the end of the world means and which outcome of the inevitable war between Heaven and Hell would be worse:

Well, Hell would be worse, of course, by definition. But Crowley remembered what Heaven was like, and it had quite a few things in common with Hell. You couldn't get a decent drink in either of them, for a start. And the boredom you got in Heaven was almost as bad as the excitement you got in Hell.

I love this theme throughout the book that Earth is, on some level, better than either Heaven or Hell.  We aren't more good than the angels from a moral standpoint, but we keep life interesting. The book makes a strong case for the idea that free will makes us superior to the angels and demons.

Aziraphale and Crowley decide to help with th upbringing of the Antichrist.  They both want to influence them to their side, but by providing equal influences, the result should be a zero sum game. Over the next eleven years, they pose as nanny, gardener, and tutors for the American child, Warlock, who is supposed to be the Antichrist.  It isn't until his eleventh birthday that they discover the nuns made a mistake and go off in search of the real Antichrist.

In the meantime the narrative introduces the other key characters in the impending Armageddon.  We meet the four riders of the apocalypse, including War (Red):

Her hair was true auburn, neither ginger nor brown, but a deep and burnished copper-color, and it fell to her waist in tresses that men would kill for and often had. Her eyes were a startling orange.  She looked twenty-five, and always had.

There's Famine (Black):

It was not surprising that she had recognized him, for his dark gray eyes stared out from his photo on the foil-embossed cover. Foodless Dieting: Slim Yourself Beautiful, the book was called; The Diet Book of the Century!

The invention of penicillin caused Pestilence to despair and retire, so Pollution (White) has taken over for him:

Nobody really noticed him.  He was unobtrusive; his presence was cumulative. If you thought about it carefully, you could figure out he had to have been doing something, had to have been somewhere. Maybe he even spoke to you. But he was easy to forget, was Mr. White.

And, finally Death:

There was nowhere that he was a stranger, and there was no getting away from him. He was  doing what he did best, and what he was doing was what he was.

I think it's interesting that the first three are each assigned a color: red, black and white.  I didn't really pick up on it until I read The Book Thief recently.  Those are the same three colors assigned to the three times Liesel "meets" Death.  In that book, it's because they are also represented in the Nazi insignia.  But I find it interesting how often that combination of colors shows up. I'll be on the lookout for it from now on.

Aside from the four riders of the apocalypse, we meet a young Anathema Device, professional descendant and witch, and Newton Pulsifer, future witch hunter and failed computer engineer.

And so we fast forward eleven years, to Warlock's eleventh birthday (Wednesday), when he doesn't receive a Hellhound.

The Hellhound seeks out another boy, Adam Young, who is hanging out with his friends Pepper, Brian, and Wensleydale.  But instead of a fearsome beast to destroy his enemies, Adam just wants a mutt to play with.  So the Hellhound becomes Dog, the perfect companion for an eleven-year-old boy living in a paradise of sorts.

Adam lives in Lower Tadfield and has used his subconscious powers to make it a little slice of Heaven.

'When do remember normal weather for the time of year?" said Newt, slightly annoyed. "Normal weather isn't normal, Sergeant. It has snow at Christmas.. When did you last see snow at Christmas? And long hot Augusts? Every year? And crisp autumns? The kind of weather you used to dream of as a kid? It never rained on November the Fifth and always snowed on Christmas Eve?"

Tadfield reminds me a bit of Camelot:

A law was made a distant moon ago here
July and August cannot be too hot
And there's a legal limit to the snow here
In Camelot
The winter is forbidden til December
And exits March the second, on the dot
By order summer lingers til September
In Camelot

While Adam and his friends play in the quarry, Crowley and Aziraphale head to the hospital in Tadfield where he was born in an effort to track him down.  On their way, Crowley hits Anathema who is biking home.  They give her a ride the rest of the way and Aziraphale fixes her bike. This is mostly an excuse for the book of prophecies to change hands from Anathema to Azirphale, as she accidentally leaves it in the car.

The angle and demon make it to the former hospital, now corporate retreat.  Unfortunately they aren't able to get any information out of the former nun who now runs it and have to proceed to plan B. Crowley drops Aziraphale off at his bookstore and they agree to reconvene as soon as any new information pops up. At this point, he notices the book in the back seat and immediately recognizes it for what it is - the lost book of actually true prophecies from Agnes Nutter.

His hands hardly shook as he laid it down on a bench, pulled on a pair of surgical rubber gloves, and opened it reverentially. Aziraphale was an angel, but he also worshipped books.

He makes some hot cocoa and sits down to read about the end of the world

Meanwhile, War receives a package - a sword  - that indicates the time to ride for the apocalypse is nigh.

On Thursday and Adam meets Anathema.  She fills his head with ideas about whales needing to be saved and the evilness of power plants.  She lends him several new age magazines to read and Adam begins to dream about a better world.  The first sign of the apocalypse is all of the uranium mysteriously disappearing from a nuclear power plant without having any effect on the power output.

On Friday, Famine receives a pair of scales and Adam begins to tell his friends about Atlantis and aliens and deforestation.  Meanwhile, Azirphale finally finishes Agnes Nutter's book and calls the Sergeant of the Witchfinder Army (a natural arm of Heaven on Earth) and asks him to send someone to Tadfield to investigate. Ten minutes later, Crowley calls the same Witchfinder Army Sergeant (a natural arm of Hell on Earth) and makes the same request. Sergeant Shadwell sends the only other member of the Army, Newton Pulsifer.

Adam's latent powers begin to make themselves known.  Atlantis rises from the ocean.

And so we come to Saturday

It was very early on Saturday morning, on the last day of the world, and the sky was redder than blood

Pollution receives a crown and the delivery man takes the final message to Death

On his way to Tadfield, Newton Pulsifer is waylaid by some aliens who pull him over.  The exchange, in which they hold him personally responsible for many of our environmental problems, is hilarious and ends with the following accusation:

"You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don't you?"

The rest of the cast begins to converge on Lower Tadfield one by one of the course of the next hundred pages. Aziraphale explains quite succinctly that this is a war between Heaven and Hell and no one really cares what happens to the humans (which is why he and Crowley are trying to stop the whole thing, of course)

I mean, you're right about the fire and war, all that. But that Rapture stuff - well, if you could see them all in Heaven - serried ranks of them as far as the mind can follow and beyond, league after league of us, flaming swords and all that, well, what I'm trying to say is who has time to go round picking people out and popping them up in the air to sneer at the people dying of radiation sickness on the parched and burning earth below them? If that's your idea of a morally acceptable time, I might add.

The four riders of the Apocalypse pick up four new Hell's Angels: "Grievous Bodily Harm, Cruelty to Animals, Things not Working Properly Even After You've Given Them a Good Thumping, but secretly No Alcohol Lager, and Really Cool People".  The additional riders don't quite make it as far as Tadfield, though.

Adam finally realizes the harm he's causing.  He becomes more Antichrist than human and nearly does destroy the world.  But he is human, after all, and at the last moment he decides he'd rather not destroy the world or change it at all.  He and his friends take off to meet up with all the other players and try to put a stop to things.  He successfully defeats the riders of the apocalypse, pitting Pepper against War, Wensleydale against Famine, Brian against Pollution, and himself against Death.

Unfortunately, this isn't enough to end the impending war between Heaven and Hell.  The Metatron and Beelzebub arrive to try and convince Adam to continue with the world ending.

"The whole point of the creation of Earth and Good and Evil - "
I don't see what's so triffic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people," said Adam severely. " Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive."

In the end, Adam triumphs over both Good and Evil and sends everyone packing.  And the book ends with one of my favorite lines:

And there never was an apple, in Adam's opinion, that wasn't worth the trouble you got into for eating it

I know this was long, and left out most of the middle bits.  It didn't even go into Sergeant Shadwell or Madame Tracy.  I left out tons in an effort to get some of my very favorite quotes in (and to actually get this posted).  But you should seriously read this book.  It's full of even more gems to discover.