"Good Omens" is a fictional novel written by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Terry Pratchett is known as the creator of the comic fantasy genre with the famous "Discworld" series. Neil Gaiman is known for his morbid, mysterious comics in the "Sandman" magazine. "Good Omens", however, is an independent novel that takes place in England sometime during the late nineteen-hundreds. At a first glance the book belongs to the comic fiction genre. As a book of this genre it is really good as well. There are numerous jokes and eccentric characters, for example Great Britain's last certified witch hunter Sergeant Shadwell. However the book also has a deeper dimension. Along with the humor a number of philosophical comments are made of the world and how man looks upon it.
The plot of the book spans eleven years and centers on the coming of Armageddon, the ultimate end of Earth. The book also assumes all the teachings of the Christian Church are true i.e. hell vs. heaven; demons and angels and Armageddon. There are a number of intricately woven subsidiary plots that gradually merge into one by the end of the story. The basic plot however is the story of Aziraphale's and Crowley's, respectively Heaven's and Hell's representatives in Western Europe, desperate struggle to stop Armageddon without getting into trouble with their superiors. Both Crowley and Aziraphale have become "humanized" from spending six thousand years on Earth and have formed "the sort of sensible arrangement that many isolated agents, working in awkward conditions a long way from their superiors, reach with their opposite number" (p 45). Their story forms a sort of central core to the plot to which the different subsidiary plots connect.
The authors gradually let the reader get a good idea of every characters respective personality. Primarily they use a character's thoughts and actions to paint a vivid portrait of the character. Sometimes they also insert short passages that physically describe a character. For example Newt is described as follows: "This is how Newton Pulsifer looked as a man: if he went into a phone-booth and changed he might well come out looking like Clark Kent" (p 176). These are both physical and mental descriptions since, in the story, nearly every character's personality is mirrored in his or hers physical appearance. Newt, for example, is a bit of a failure in his life as well as his looks.
Another important character, apart from Aziraphale and Crowley, is Adam, the eleven-year old antichrist. Due to a mistake by Crowley he grows up without divine or diabolical guidance and it is on him that the "success" of Armageddon ultimately hinges. He is the one who speaks out at he end of the story, in this case about saving the whales: "Once I start messing around there's no stopping it. Seems to me, the only sensible thing is for people to know that if they kill a whale, they've got a dead whale". This is in fact the central theme of the book: Man needs to take care of himself. There is no use in relying on divine intervention or miracles, whether these are plausible or not. In the end the ultimate choice to how man's life and fortune is going to be is left to man himself. At the same time, while the book in no way denies God's existence, it points out that God is not just some super human playing a sort of cosmic chess-game against another giant human, the devil. Because that would make God and Satan equals and, even more importantly, it would reduce God to Satan's status neither of them really better than the other. Instead, it is argued, God's nature is impossible for anyone whether mortal or immortal to understand. "It can't be a cosmic chess game, it has to be just very complicated game of Solitaire. If we could understand we wouldn't be us" (p 374). In short, the way of God is ineffable and all man can do is his best.
"Good Omens" is written in a very cynical tone, but at the same time the authors manage to project a very optimistic picture of mankind, or at least what man could be, using descriptive yet colloquial style. The humoristic style helps bring out philosophical points and temper the style so that the book does not become some moral ridden, but unreadable, piece of writing. As the novel takes place in England the style is very British both in its language and references. The book is littered with footnotes of the type: "Note for Americans and other city-dwelling life forms: the rural British, having enshewed central heating as far to complicated and in any case weakening moral fibre, prefer a system of piling large wet logs, possibly made from asbestos, into a small smouldering heaps known as 'There's nothing like a roaring fire is there?'" (p 189).
The book is also very unorthodox in its presentation. For example: there are no chapters in the book instead the story simply jumps around between the different subsidiary plots. This technique helps to grip the reader as it does not divide the story into abrupt parts and the many subsidiary plots gives variation and prevents the story from becoming long and rambling. Furthermore, although the point of view remains in the third person throughout the book the authors still manage to give very personal descriptions of most of the characters so that the reader easily can imagine what the story would look like if it were written in first person from the perspective of any of the characters.
"Good Omens" is one of the best books, if not the best book, that I have ever read. It has a varied plot and cast and a completely unique style that takes the best of many different genres. The plot develops rapidly to create a suspenseful mood that lasts right until final climax in the last few pages of the book. The story is also packed with humor and small philosophical musings that reflect on the human condition. At the same time, the plot never becomes predictable which makes every sentence in the book worth reading.
