Good Omens

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman wrote Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch in the late 1980’s. This was long before they were Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman, and it was a task they took on of their own accord. In this novel, the reader can see the beginnings of what was to come with each of these authors.

This is the tale of the coming apocalypse, ostensibly at the hands of the son of Satan, one Adam Young. Unfortunately for Satan his main minion on Earth, Crowley, and Crowley’s more celestial counterpart Aziraphale, don’t really want to give up life on Earth. Due to this, and the ineptitude of human help, the success of the ineffable plan is very much at risk.

Good Omens is a novel peopled by many colorful characters (really with these two authors at the helm one would expect nothing less). Beyond Crowley and Aziraphale we find such illustrious characters as Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell with his obsession with the number of nipples everyone possesses (clearly an indication of your inner witchiness), Madam Tracy, Anathema Device, Newton Pulsifer, and of course Agnes Nutter herself.

One minor detractor to the brilliance of this novel is the fact that Gaiman and Pratchett repeatedly introduce characters whose only function is to provide a viewpoint on the action for a few paragraphs. After these flash in the pan characters have served this purpose they are never heard from again. While this is effective, I question whether or not this device would have been used had this book been written later in Pratchett and Gaiman's careers.

Any veteran reader of Pratchett and/or Gaiman will know just how witty and sarcastic this novel is, even without turning the first page. For instance, the Four Riders of the Apocalypse are loose in the world. Plague has been replaced by Pollution because Plague couldn’t handle the pressure after the discovery of the effectiveness of Penicillin. Famine is hugely successful in producing a line of “food” that tastes just like the real thing, but has no actual useable calories or nutrition, thus a person can gorge to the point of gluttony and still die of starvation. War is a retired arms dealer, and now the preeminent war journalist of the time, and Death is, of course, Death.

We can find some comparisons between the Discworld and the Earth of Good Omens. Death here is much more old school Death than our old friend from the Discworld, but you can chalk that up to his presence on Earth instead of in the Discworld. In one scene if you don’t blink you can even catch a glimpse of the Earth version of C.M.O.T Dibbler.

We as readers are lucky that Gaiman and Pratchett collaborated way back when before they became who they are today and had time for such a thing. This is a brilliant work that foreshadowed what was to come for each of them. Despite its few flaws it is a work well worth reading. I give it a 4.5/5.