50 Book Challenge: Book 39
Good Omens – Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman (re-read)
Kids! Bringing about Armageddon can be dangerous. Do not attempt it in your home.
I have no excuse for quoting this. I am merely doing it because I find it extremely amusing. In fact, let’s go really wild. Here’s another one:
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.
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I decided I would re-read this book, having read it once in a bid to come to terms with the entirety of the vast Pratchett opus, and not really having taken it in properly. I’m now just starting to really read things by Neil Gaiman so that was another good excuse. And it was brilliant. Fun, entertaining, hard to put down and full of lovely little linguistic flourishes and games of the kind you would expect from both these authors. True to my memory, it did seem to have rather more happening in it than is reasonable in one 400-page paperback volume, so the re-read was definitely worthwhile. Lots of familiar Pratchett motifs – a Death who wears a cowled robe and talks in capital letters (and never laid a finger on Elvis Presley, honest); a witchfinder’s pin with a nice big knob on the end; Leonard of Quirm, no, sorry, Leonardo da Vinci; Azrael; and an importunate hot-dog seller to name a few obvious ones. I’m sure that if I was equally familiar with Gaiman’s work I would find as many of his usual motifs – just from reading his blog and one or two comics I can see lots and lots of his writing style on the page.
Many of the criticisms of this book seem to be aimed at the fact that, as a collaboration, it is not absolutely the best thing either author has produced. OK, point taken, but this seems to me to be a logical absurdity. Is it therefore the case that they should *not* have collaborated? That some magnum opus that would have delighted the world and won every literary prize going was *not* written because of the existence of Good Omens? I doubt it. Some of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels are, er, a long way from being the best work he has ever produced as well. I would say this is far better than, for example, Eric (to pick a thematically appropriate example). I found it thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining and was glad to have read it. It has hosts (sorry) of delightful characters and quite a serious point, actually, underneath all the irony, laughter and wordplay.
Put simply, it’s about humanity triumphing over prescribed notions of both good and evil. Quite an atheistic point in a book so heavy with religious symbolism and in which both the Metatron (think presidential spokesman) and Beelzebub make an appearance, as well as the angel and demon occupying substantial places in the ensemble cast. We see a good number of characters resolutely refusing to occupy their prescribed roles – Adam, Anathema, Crowley and Aziraphale and, eventually, Shadwell, being among them. And the last lines of the story proper give the best explanation of its theme:
“And there never was an apple, in Adam’s opinion, that wasn’t worth the trouble you got into for eating it.”
A fantastic motto for life. But not one that sheds any light on why I seem to spend so much time reading books about the coming Apocalypse…
Some links: