From: eric@snark.thyrsus.com (Eric S. Raymond)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Raymond's Reviews #187: Good Omens
Date: 9 Apr 92 19:30:36 GMT


This is Raymond's Reviews #187

%T Good Omens
%A Neil Gaiman
%A Terry Pratchett
%I Berkeley
%D March 1992
%O trade paperback, US$8.95
%P 354
%G ISBN 0-425-13215-3

A blurb on this book says "it could catch on with the Douglas Adams crowd".
This is quite true but mildly unfair to Terry Pratchett, who is both a more
intelligent and a much funnier writer than Douglas Adams.  He proved that
repeatedly in the _Discworld_ novels, and demonstrates it again in this sly
deconstruction of Christian eschatology.

Another blurb says "Imagine _The_Omen_ as done by Monty Python" and that's
much nearer the mark.  After 2000 years, Armageddon is nigh and the
Antichrist is scheduled to manifest in the womb of the wife of the American
cultural attache in London.  Only, er, there's a bit of a mixup.  Sister
Mary Loquacious, a Satanic nun of the Chattering Order of St. Beryl, 
inadvertently switches the tyke with the newborn son of a salt-of-the-earth
English couple from Lower Tadfield.

The demon Crowley (Hell's chief illegal resident, as it were, on Earth) and
his counterpart Aziraphale (Heaven's ditto) spend a great deal of time and
effort trying to corrupt/enlighten a perfectly ordinary human being who
seems remarkably unaffected by the experience.  Meanwhile, odd things are
beginning to manifest around a little boy in Lower Tadfield....

Mind you, neither of these two is very happy about the oncoming End of the
World.  One gets used to sunsets and Bach and good restaurants; but orders
are orders.  In fact, they reached something of an agreement about 1060
A.D.  and ever since have been --- well, *collaborating* is such an ugly
word.  But the mixup is messing with the schedule and that Can't Be
Allowed.  They set out to track down the missing Antichrist.

Meanwhile in Lower Tadfield, a charming young witch named Anathema Device
is looking for the source of the disturbance in England's ley lines.  All
this was prophecied by her ancestor Agnes Nutter --- but Goodie Nutter's
prophecies are couched in such mangled language that it's seldom possible
to make sense out of them before the thing they predict has happened.

And then the Antichrist meets Anathema and the fun really starts.  Because
*this* kid's faith quite literally *can* move mountains.  And Anathema
fills his head with the flakiest brand of pop occultism imaginable.

Anybody who's read any of Pratchett's previous work at all knows the
results are going to be hilarious.  I'm not sure what Neil Gaiman brought
to the party, but the collaboration is just as witty and wise as
Pratchett's solo stuff.  Everyone from the Dukes of Hell on downward (or,
er, upward) bumbles around with all the cheerful, vague incompetence and/or
deranged intensity you'd expect (frequently both at once).

But the real stinger in this book is that underneath the humor Pratchett at
Gaiman really are addressing the Problem of Evil.  They recognize (as I
think any honest thinker must) that there's an unresolvable contradiction
in the Judeo-Christian picture of Good and Evil, one xure to come around
and bite you in the ass if you start thinking seriously about the mythos of
the "End Times".  Rather than trying to rationalize away the problem or
mumbling evasions about the unknowability of the mind of God, they use it
as the mainspring of the plot --- and at the denoument they tackle its
implications head-on.  The results are almost Swiftean in their power and
irony.  Doing that much philosophy while maintaining a high giggle level
isn't easy, and I heartily commend them for having made it work.