Good Omens (1990)
For someone who claims to love books, I am really bad at reading them. I blame work, my phone and OTT platforms for that. I read ‘Good Omens’ over a period of three months, which is terrible, because it only has about four-hundred pages. Ideally I should have finished in about three weeks, or less.
But, I’d been working overtime, (yes, I was working overtime from home during the worst stages of the Corona virus pandemic, when the world economy was taking a hit and people were losing jobs, because certain organizations named after rainforests make a lot of money even if millions are dying. Alas, that is how capitalist systems function!) and my method of relaxing after eleven hours of work became Netflix, and not my book. Don’t get me wrong. The book is pretty entertaining. It’s a lot of fun, actually. But I paid more for Netflix, and what I was watching didn’t need as much concentration as reading a book. I just needed to zone out for a bit, if you know what I mean. I didn’t have the energy to examine something intently to be able to review it.
So anyway I’d watch what I was watching on Netflix for an hour or so, and then pick up my book only to read five or six pages at a time. You know, to not lose track of the story. To be honest, this did not help me at all with my review process. While I understood what was going on in the story, I might have missed out on some subtleties, finer points and deeper meanings. I might have done a great disservice to the book reading it the way I did, and missing out on a lot. Or maybe I haven’t. But I promised myself that I would write about this book. So here goes.
‘Good Omens’ by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman is as a delightful book, as you would expect it to be. A modern, urban fantasy set in London and the surrounding countryside, it is about a demon named Crowley and an angel named Aziraphale who try to stop Armageddon by ensuring that the Antichrist grows up to be a “normal” boy. Because hell is horribly exciting, and heaven is dismally boring. And the best place to be is Earth. And without Earth, where is the fun in it all?
The book is essentially a comedy of errors which involves satanic nuns, a gang of little children (one of which is a little girl, who if the story continued, would grow up to be the most manic pixie dreamy of manic pixie dream girls in my opinion), demons from the deepest layers of hell, personifications of awful phenomena like war and pollution, somersaulting cows, a rather underwhelming hell hound, mad witch finders, and several other quirky characters. The story moves through London and surrounding areas, and is fast paced, entertaining, witty, and very, very funny.
I suppose the book makes you question conventional ideas of God, Heaven, Satan and Hell, and in a broader sense the point of things. What is the meaning of it all? What if the angels aren’t as virtuous and the demons as wicked as we believe they are? What if the greatest good and greatest evil is found in the hearts of men? What if it’s not all black and white, but just a lot of greys? Even for Heaven and Hell. And what does He (as in God) mean by it all? Why put the tree in such a conspicuous place if the apple was not to be eaten? Why do the rich get richer, and the poor get poorer? Why did Covid-19 happen? Why do people love demagogues? The ‘ineffability’ of it all. Is there a plan at all? What purpose does everything serve? Is it all just completely and utterly random? Is there a plan in the randomness? Like a line in the book goes: “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, to being involved in an obscure and complex version of poker 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.”
But other than that, it’s just a really funny, witty and overall awesome book to read on a sunny afternoon!
(Images from various sources on Google.)
