“Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow.”
People have been telling me to read Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett for about eight years now. And I, in response to their well-meaning advice, have been nodding pleasantly, smiling, and then continuing on about my business reading my epic Dragon Lance novels. (Because I have always been one of the cool kids.)
Back when I was a young and tender thing without the wisdom and insight I have today, I used to hate reading. Well. That’s not true. I just wasn’t any good at it. I’m certainly not dyslexic, but anyone who has heard me attempt to read aloud knows that the mechanics of my reading abilities are somewhat compromised. It makes spelling fun!
Then I started reading fun books. And by ‘fun books’ I mean sci-fi and fantasy novels. Because they were easy, engaging, and they took me to an entirely different world. What’s not to love? I then started selectively rummaging through the ‘classics’ in the field, read or dismissed them all, and had a grand good time. If anyone wants to get into a conversation about some of the poorly written crap or the brilliant, but hidden gems within this particular literary arena, we’re totally going out for coffee and chattering away.
Cause, as a general theme when it comes to this particular sect of reading materials, I tend to go against the grain. I hate Robert Jordan, Terry Goodkind, Anne Rice and so on. For whatever reason, their writing styles rubbed me the wrong way. Did it make sense? Not always. Did it turn me off popular authors in general? It sure did. Was that unreasonable? Absolutely.
So you could understand my irrational aversion to the most popular co-written book to be devised by the gods of geekery. Ever since I picked up my first sci-fi book I had known about Terry Pratchett, whose wit and expansive imagination is known throughout the land. And I had even read some stuff by Neil Gaiman, who had a remarkable way of making dorky fantasy and emo-tasticness cool. They’re genre legends. The rock stars of the odd yet coveted space of being funny while also remaining firmly in the fantasy/sci-fi realm. (Other people who have occupied this space and been wildly successful: JRR Tolkien. Douglas Adams. Thus endith the list.)
But that’s why I avoided this book for so long. Genre-wise, Good Omens is the book of books. Created by the greats before they were all that great, and therefore even better than it would have been if they had written it when they were properly famous.
It’s the story of the apocalypse, skewed. The Anti-Christ has been born, his name is Adam, and he was sort of misplaced by the minions of darkness and the angels of heaven for eleven years. Two cronies on different sides of this impending war (Crowley the demon, Aziraphale the angel) are rather upset about this, as they had been doing their best to be certain that the future Lord of Darkness wouldn’t go about destroying the world (they both had become rather attached to it, after all). Now, a decade later and days before The End, our two misfits along with a cast of other entertaining sorts (a professional descendant, two witch finders, a jezebel, the four horse people of the apocalypse, a rag-tag group of kids and their dog (Dog)) are rushing around trying to figure out what exactly to do about their impending destruction.
It was a hilarious way to spend four hundred pages, appropriate for all of those interested in having a well-intending laugh at religion, a few insights into humanity, and watching the interplay of two great authors at work. And I’m not even mentioning the delightful footnotes. And probably the best thing about it is that it doesn't take the reader to an entirely different world - just the opposite. This book is nothing more than a (far more hilarious than average) examination of how normal people placed in extraordinary circumstances might react. Granted, with some of these normal people being witches and demons, but still.
When I was younger, the thing I liked most about fantasy was the ability to be transported to somewhere else. Now that I'm a bit older and a bit over my honeymoon phase with the sci-fi/fantasy world, I appreciate the alternative. Nothing about the circumstances in Good Omens is real, and very little about the people in it is either. But there is a persistent streak of humanity in the book that the authors highlight, and the result has left me delighted and utterly charmed.
If you find yourself inclined toward the cleverly ridiculous, and if for some reason you (like myself) haven't read Good Omens yet, please do so. You'll be shocked at how much fun the apocalypse can be.
Thank you!
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