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koilungfishAuthor - Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman
ISBN - 0-552-13703-0
"The ducks in St James's Park are so used to being fed bread by secret agents meeting clandestinely that they have developed their own Pavlovian reaction. Put a St James's Park duck in a laboratory cage and show it a picture of two men - one usually wearing a coat with a fur collar, the other something sombre with a scarf - and it'll look up expectantly. The Russian cultural attache's black bred is particularly sought after by the more discerning duck, while the head of MI9's soggy Hovis with marmite is relished by the connoisseurs."Good Omens is a book about the unification of opposed pairs. Well, technically it's about the end of the world, the riding of the Four Horsemen and the coming of the Antichrist, but that's just the plot. The meat of the book, that which will incite the reader to go from page to page, is the spiralling inwards of relationships between opposed characters.
The list of characters is long. In no particular order, there are Aziraphale and Crowley, angel and demon; Shadwell and Madame Tracy, witchfinder and medium; Newton Pulsifer and Anathema Device, witchfinder and witch; these are some of the major pairs of the book. Others include Heaven and Hell, not to mention Pratchett and Gaiman.
To backtrack a little and start in a more conventional fashion, Good Omens is a story about the End of Days, which goes a little wrong due to a rather incompetent Satanic nun, meaning that the Antichrist is raised as a perfectly normal middle-class English boy. Chaos, confusion and the conversion of the M25 into a gigantic Satanic prayer-wheel follow on. The plot also involves a book of exceptionally accurate if rather cryptic prophecies, and for once it's nice to see prophecies being cryptic not just so that they aren't obvious in advance, but with the rationalisation that someone from the past is unlikely to understand the future, let alone be able to spell it.
Events move in fast sequence; this is no build-up to a single event and then disperse, ala Poppy Z. Brite's Lost Souls. Objects and information pass from character to character like the ball in a well-executed sequence of rugby passes. At no point it is clear to the reader how anyone is going to get out of anything, yet there is never the sense of grim despair that causes the reader to lay the book down.
Indeed, stylistically Good Omens is a triumph. The marriage of Pratchett's patented voice - already a good strong balance of well-constructed characters, solid storytelling, little lighthearted lifts formed from humour and humanity to offset and alleviate the straight-up serious business - to Gaiman's grander, darker, perhaps more mature and perhaps just more artsy ways forms a truly winning style. There is no sense that this bit is Gaiman and this bit is Pratchett, no telling shifts in diction, just a seamless fusion of two strong styles into one grand one. Pratchett's human touch balances Gaiman's grandeur; Gaiman's darker edges strengthen Pratchett's entirely necessary but sometimes a mite homely rendering of the mundane. These are two great writers working with full toolkits, both bringing something very different to the job, and combining their art and their craft into what is undeniably a tour de force. It is no surprise they only wrote one book together; this sort of lightning can't strike twice.
As mentioned, Good Omens is about the meeting of opposites, the fusion of pairs. Aziraphale and Crowley are the most obvious examples, being similar creatures on opposite sides of the battle-lines who have grown closer and closer through long-term association. By the end of things it is pretty clear that the only side they're really on is each other's. The theme of opposites uniting is followed in Anathema Device, witch, psychic and professional descendant, and Newton Pulsifer, witch hunter, clerk and amateur descendant. These two people, with every reason to hate one another, meet like neighbouring jigsaw pieces.
This duplication, the constant presentation of opposites and pairs, comes even with the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, of whom there are three versions - the supernatural, the human and the somewhere in-between. In fact, the very climax of the story stands on the unification of opposites, the balancing of Heaven and Hell, and it is a testimony to the skill with which Gaiman and Pratchett do this that it is not hammered home with a mallet, it is not lanced into the reader with a needle, but left subtle beneath the surface. The whole book is, when viewed from a distance with a critical eye, a mass of reflections, of the central dilemma of where humanity stands vis a vis Heaven and Hell refracted and recombined through characters and situations.
This is, in my mind, a good and perhaps great thing. The worst part of a mediocre story is that it does not say anything. All stories must say something; it is what gives them a meaning, a point, a reason for existing. The purpose of a story is to say something about what it means to be alive, to be human. Gaiman and Pratchett are saying here something subtle and complicated about Christianity, humanity and what it means to have free will. Without this thought beneath the story, Good Omens could well come off as a slightly confused mess of characters running around doing slightly random things for slightly obscure reasons. It doesn't. It comes across as a fluid series of events all rushing rapidly towards a very grand and needed climax.
This is not to call Good Omens perfect. There is at least one point in the book where it seems as if three days pass for Aziraphale whilst one day passes for everyone else. The exact whereabouts of everyone at the finale are a little confusing, and how some people get from A to B, or why, is a little obscure.
Those are small flaws in a very good book. I do recommend Good Omens to just about everyone who enjoys a solidly excellent story. The only disappointment may be to the adult reader who doesn't feel like skimming the upper end of what's suitable for the young adult market.
This book is:
* - very good
* - one of my favourites
* - about the unification of opposites
This book is not:
* - specifically like anything else out there
* - exactly a book for the young adult market
* - all that far about young adult market
