Booking It: Good Omens

We may be past Halloween, but Good Omens is good reading any time of the year. Written by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett back before either of them were famous, this novel is a hilarious story about the apocalypse and the eternal battle between heaven and hell. Neil Gaiman is the author of surpassingly original, darkly fantastical books such as Coraline, American Gods and The Sandman comics. His stories are full of the adventures of bizarre, fascinating characters and offbeat humor, all taking place in creepy or unsettling and unfamiliar worlds. Terry Pratchett is best known for his Discworld books, a series of over 40 fantasy novels that are all set in Discworld, a flat world carried on the back of four elephants on the back of a giant turtle who’s walking through space. Terry Pratchett is a king of humor. In Discworld he satirizes everything from Lord of the Rings to colonialism, making me laugh on every page while still providing powerful commentary and genuinely touching moments. His characters are vibrantly colorful and his world endlessly inventive. Together, these two authors have written a book that is original, clever, exciting, endlessly funny, bursting with personality and it will keep you glued to the page until there is no more to read.

The book draws some inspiration from the 1976 horror film classic The Omen, at least in its initial set-up. The Anti-Christ is born and an order of Satanic nuns switch him out with an ordinary baby to be raised by an unsuspecting couple. The book’s protagonists, however, are not the couple, but rather an angel, Aziraphale, and a demon, Crowley, who both decide that they rather like Earth and are going to attempt to stop the apocalypse. The problem is, someone has misplaced the Anti-Christ. The world spirals into confusion as the apocalypse begins, with the four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, witch hunters, witches, hell hounds, aliens, Atlantisans and many more running amuck. Gaiman and Pratchett write incredibly well together. There is no inconsistency in the tone or style of the book and I can rarely point to a scene or a character and say definitively which author wrote that part. There are some obvious ones, for instance the character of Death bears a number of similarities to the Death in the Discworld novels. Likewise, some of the particularly creepy scenes are definitely more reminiscent of Gaiman’s novels than Pratchett’s. However, never at any point does it feel as though there are two authors struggling to tell the same story different ways.

The phrase “funny apocalypse story” does not, in general, make a lot of sense. It helps that the book is mainly a lead-up to the apocalypse rather than the event itself, so there are not immediately dozens of deaths. The authors do a wonderful job of balancing out anything horrible with more positive moments. They also by and large keep you at arm’s length from anything too awful. This is not one of those stories that you laugh at but then feel awful for doing so.

People do die, though, sometimes horribly or pitifully, and the book brings up themes that can be serious and thought-provoking. Aziraphale and Crowley’s whole alliance questions whether a dichotomy of good and evil truly exists, or if it is simply about picking sides. I see Pratchett’s genius at work here. His novels frequently combat a common misconception: just because a book is funny and light-hearted does not mean it can’t have something important to say. Yes, this novel is comedic and sometimes downright silly, but it does not disregard serious ideas. Instead, Gaiman and Pratchett slip those ideas into the stew of humor and outlandish apocalypse events, leaving them there to be considered at the reader’s leisure. It isn’t the type of literature that will leave you pondering human existence or inspired to analyze it for hours, nor is it completely literary slapstick.

Good Omens is fun. It is fun to read; it is fun to laugh at, and even the authors wrote it for fun, not because they were aiming to write a classic or a bestseller. The characters are full of idiosyncratic personality and when thrown together make the book explode off the page with their strange and unexpected antics. Parts of the plot seem as though they should just be stupid, like Atlantis rising to the surface, but the wild impossibilities are so tongue-in-cheek and humorously written that they leave me rolling on the floor with laughter. This is absurdity at its best: clever, unrestrained, and above all, funny. A brilliant collaboration between two great authors, Good Omens will make you laugh long and loud.