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Good Omens contains multitudes and many genres, but the seed of its creation is a love story between Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Another love story drives its plot, between the star-crossed angel Aziraphale and his cosmic nemesis, the demon Crowley. Pratchett and Gaiman fell for each other’s wit, weirdness and wide-eyed curiosity. This led them on a meandering journey, exploring and playing together, eventually creating a shared world to amuse each other and combine their delight. As Good Omens’ appendices tell it:
Once upon a time Neil Gaiman wrote half a short story. He didn’t know how it ended. He sent it to Terry Pratchett, who didn’t know, either. But it festered away in Terry’s mind and he rang Neil about a year later and said: “I don’t know how it ends, but I do know what happens next.” The first draft took about two months, the second draft took about six months . . . [Neil says:] This is how we wrote a novel together. I’d write late at night. Terry wrote early in the morning. In the afternoon we’d have very long phone conversations where we’d read each other the best bits we’d written, and talk about stuff that could happen next. The main objective was to make the other one laugh.
I find this all-encompassing creative cooperation so inspiring, I want more of it in my own life. I see Lennon/McCartney as one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century. They shared all their fresh musical discoveries, the tenderness between them, and also their competitive egos, as they raced to write a better hit song, to win the A-side of their next single. Then they offered up more hooks and bridges, to improve each other’s hits. A partnership where every element of you is allowed and encouraged; a garden to grow your soul in, where teamwork becomes transcendent.
Good Omens is so ripe with humanity, delving deep into all flavors of thought and feeling. I love how Pratchett and Gaiman play upon every conceivable key of humor, from arcane scholarly surprises to slapstick and atrocious puns. I find Good Omens utterly delicious, and unlike any other book I’ve read. Well, it is a bit similar to The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and to Pratchett’s Discworld series and the wittier of Gaiman’s books. I can’t give you an objective assessment of Good Omens’ literary merit; I am too enchanted. But it’s a fact that millions of readers love this book as much as I do. If you enjoy weird and wonderful books, please buy or borrow Good Omens, to see for yourself if it tickles your fancy. If you already did, and it does, then welcome to this fan club.
Pratchett and Gaiman can get away with such disparate humorous ornaments, without collapsing it all into a shapeless ridiculous hodge-podge, because the Douglas fir they hung them on feels so real and convincing. The narratives behind their tale are deep-rooted in our culture, stories we’ve known since were children, and their characters are individuals drawn into granular life.
Pratchett and Gaiman examine their world and each character in it through many frames of reference, and all these facets add up to vibrant, evolving beings. Aziraphale and Crowley start as stock characters from a medieval mystery play, but their millennia on Earth and their gradual friendship humanize them, for better and for worse. The central plot—the antichrist is born and raised to accomplish armageddon—is drawn primarily from the Bible and the ‘70s horror classic, The Omen. But Pratchett and Gaiman also surround him with the doggiest dog (though born a hellhound), the daddiest dad, his gang of best friends and a storybook English village, where the weather is always perfect for the season. Which never happens anywhere else in England. These complex forces stretch Adam the antichrist on several orthogonal planes, as he grows into a more complete and mysterious boy (and dark divinity) than could fit in any of those original source plots.
The Book of Revelation and The Omen lay a sublime narrative foundation: tales of horror, madness, and the most epic stakes imaginable. Pratchett and Gaiman have poured over that all their own humanity and absurd wit — so, but of course, the carefully planned cosmic showdown between the forces of Good vs. Evil, the ultimate destruction of Earth and Humankind, goes off all its ineffable rails. Then Aziraphale and Crowley race to find where the actual antichrist has been misplaced to, before their ranks of angelic superiors (both celestial and fallen) find out their errors, and hunt them down, to punish them ad infinitum.
When Aziraphale and Crowley track Adam the antichrist down to Lower Tadfield, Aziraphale, a sensitive angel who has grown softer living among humans, picks up a warmth all around the village, a feeling of everything being cherished immensely. Pratchett and Gaiman have imbued every atom of their world with that very feeling, of deep love for all of their creation. Somehow, as we readers travel through these pages and witness so much horror and absurdity, it feels fundamentally graspable, it’s all alright — because it is all woven together and made whole with love. Every whale and maggot, every hubcap and answering machine, is true to itself, and just how it’s meant to be.
The Bentley roared through the night, heading east.
Of course, he was all in favor of Armageddon in general terms. If anyone asked him why he’d been spending centuries tinkering in the affairs of mankind he’d have said, ”Oh, in order to bring about Armageddon and the triumph of Hell.” But it was one thing to work to bring it about, and quite another for it to actually happen.
Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn’t have any alternative. But he’d hoped it would be a long way off.
Because he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.
Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do to themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he . . . “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn’t even known about it until the commendation arrived. He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.
That Hieronymus Bosch. What a weirdo.
And just when you’d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.
Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he’d said—this was somewhere around 1020, when they’d first reached their little arrangement—the whole point was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn’t become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.
Crowley had thought about that for some time and, around about 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can’t start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.
Ah, Aziraphale had said, that’s the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have.
Crowley had said, That’s lunatic.
No, said Aziraphale, it’s ineffable.
Aziraphale. The enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him sort of a friend.
Good Omens — the TV Show
If I like a story enough to digest it twice, I usually read the book first, so that my own imagination can visualize this fictional world, however it looks whole and right in my mind’s eye. Only after finishing the book will I watch a movie or tv show of the same tale. Good Omens was made into a six episode TV series, and I bought the DVD some time ago, but then put off watching it, lest the TV show interfere with my review of the book. As this review approached its final shape, I began watching the show, and I’m now four episodes in.
Good Omens was published in 1990, and down through the years there was much talk of making it into a movie or a TV show. In 2002 Terry Gilliam wanted to make a movie of it, with Johnny Depp as Crowley and Robin Williams as Aziraphale (and Madame Tracy). But between studio misfortunes and misunderstandings, and a budget that would have been huge (until visual effects reached where they are now), none of it panned out. Then Terry Pratchett, alas, died, and it looked like the show would never happen. Except, Terry’s last request was that Neil get it done. So Neil cut back on his prodigious writing, to become showrunner of Good Omens, and make sure that it came out properly, true to itself, and just how it was meant to be.
“All I wanted to do was to make something Terry would have liked,” Gaiman says. “That was the only rule.” That link will take you to the best Gaiman interview I found, mostly about making the Good Omens TV show. My second favorite, here, is a bit longer and more wide-ranging.
Neil Gaiman started his re-creation from his love of the book, the world that he and Terry had made together, and any odd thing that would have made Terry smile or laugh. As Peter Jackson achieved with his Lord of the Rings movies, Gaiman did a marvelous job of capturing the spirit of the original and blowing it up into a beautiful onscreen vision. But he had an added freedom, of living in the essence of that world’s meaning, so that he could improvise as needed to make the show flow, while keeping true to Good Omens’ world.
Good Omens is a big book, 110,000 words, intricately woven from so many moving parts. I found the book dug deeper, into philosophy and the psychology of the characters, and found room for more subplots and many more beautifully drawn details. However, the show is equally rich and more textured, with enough movie magic to dazzle and surprise someone who, like me, has read the book three times over three decades. I thank all the creative spirits atop their elephants that Terry and Neil found each other, fell in love, and chose this marvelous way to express that bond, and show it to all of us. May we each make one thing in our life so good, albeit for a smaller audience.
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