Good Omens is now a TV series!
What a crazy, delightful book! I won’t even attempt to summarize it. Suffice it to say that it involves the Apocalypse, an angel called Aziraphale and a demon called Crowley who are the representatives of Heaven and Hell on earth, the Antichrist (who just happens to be an 11-year-old boy), a witch called Agnes Nutter and her descendants, and some Witchhunters.
Anyone who grew up with Richmal Crompton’s William books will notice the similarity in the way Adam, the Antichrist, and his three friends carry on their lives in the small village of Lower Tadfield.
“It doesn’t matter”, said Adam. “France is nearly Spanish, an’ I don’t expect witches know the difference, what with spendin’ all their time flyin’ around at night. It all looks like the Continong to witches. Anyway, if you don’t like it you can jolly well go and start your own Inquisition, anyway.
Also featured are the Four Horsemen, oops, Horsepersons of the Apocalypse.
- War is a redhaired war correspondent with a flaming sword. She turns up in war zones before conflict breaks out, coincidentally.
- Famine, a diet guru whose company also makes fast food that will guarantee loss of weight — and hair, skin tone, and vital signs.
- Pollution is the young replacement for Pestilence, who retired in disgust when penicillin was invented.
- Death, who has made many glorious appearances in Pratchett’s novels, is much the same here: calm, detached, and philosophical. “DON’T THINK OF IT AS DYING. JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH.”
Who can be surprised at all this when the authors are Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman? It’s hard to imagine any two authors cooperating on a novel — what when their ideas go in opposite directions? What if one hates a sentence or plotline written by the other? — but these two have similarities: completely irreverent, offbeat humor, buckets of charm and whimsy. And apparently they got along famously.
We wrote the first draft in about nine weeks. Nine weeks of gloriously long phone calls, in which we would read each other what we’d written, and try to make the other one laugh. We’d plot, delightedly, and then hurry off the phone, determined to get to the next good bit before the other one could. We’d rewrite each other, footnote each other’s pages, sometimes even footnote each other’s footnotes.
[Neil Gaiman in the BBC Magazine: How Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a book]
We would throw characters in, hand them off when we got stuck. We finished the book and decided we would only tell people a little about the writing process – we would tell them that Agnes Nutter was Terry’s, and the Four Horsemen (and the Other Four Motorcyclists) were mine.
There are two adult women in the novel (well, there’s also War, but she is a little beyond being merely female) and they are rather disappointing. Madame Tracy is a medium, and her seances exist largely to advance the plot. She is mystifyingly nice to her thoroughly unpleasant neighbour, Sgt. Shadwell, the head of the WitchHunters, despite the fact that his kindest greeting to her is “Hoor of Babylon! Jezebel!” Towards the end of the book, her only goal is to lure him into marriage. It is hard to imagine a more distasteful future for the poor woman.
Anathema Device is the descendent of Agnes Nutter, and is a fine character in her own right. She too is peculiarly drawn into a romance, in her case with Newton Pulsifer, a junior Witchhunter. Surely there are other more appealing men around than Newton, a failed, helpless engineer? But no, by the end of the book the strong, capable Anathema is being referred to as ‘Mrs Pulsifer’, and she is being gently advised by the newly confident Newton.
It’s hard to imagine packing all this into a film, but a TV series has promise. Neil Gaiman says that the TV series expands on the original book, and that he has written new bits: we can hope he has updated or modernized the female characters.
David Tennant and Martin Sheen as Crowley and Aziraphale? Spot on, I should think. Frances McDormand as God (aha! see discussion of female characters above) and Benedict Cumberbatch as Satan? Intriguing.
Can’t wait. (she says with crossed fingers, hoping the TV series has only improved a largely brilliant book).
Have a nice Doomsday.
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