Good Omens

SYNOPSIS:

There is a hint of Armageddon in the air. According to the Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (recorded, thankfully, in 1655, before she blew up her entire village and all its inhabitants, who had gathered to watch her burn), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. So the Armies of Good and Evil are massing, the four Bikers of the Apocalypse are revving up their mighty hogs and hitting the road, and the world's last two remaining witchfinders are getting ready to Fight the Good Fight. Atlantis is rising. Frogs are falling. Tempers are flaring, and everything appears to be going to Divine Plan.

Except that a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon are not particularly looking forward to the coming Rapture. They've lived amongst Humanity for millennia, and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle. So if Crowley and Aziraphale are going to stop it from happening, they've got to find and kill the AntiChrist (which is a shame, really, as he's a nice kid). There's just one glitch: someone seems to have misplaced him.

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REVIEW:

I couldn’t help but think about who wrote what. Terry Pratchett is one of my idols: for me, he’s a Fantasy warlock, a master of words and a literary genius. Of course, such things shouldn’t matter because when you co-write a book (and like both authors say at the end), the work is as much of one as is of the other. You forget who thought about what, whose idea it was to do things a certain way and who decided that comma made more sense a few words later.

But even so, I wondered, especially because this is so amazingly woven and written, on a first reading you can’t distinguish styles. It feels like Gaiman and Pratchett became one, a new person a mind of its own who created a MASTERPIECE.

Above all, I loved this work because it was a religious satire and its allegorical representations.

If you don’t like to think about this topic or to have your values and faith questioned, you shouldn't pick this book up, since it really makes you question the purpose of everything. Is Heaven really good and Hell really bad? Or is there no such thing as good and evil? If the couple is a mirror of humanity, shouldn’t they be both good AND evil?

Aziraphale (let’s just appreciate the fact that he’s gay, yet another stab in all the religious homophobes out there) and Crowley are allegories of good and evil but really neither are none. They are complex beings, that besides acting in the name of their respective Lords, also have their own purposes and ideas. Throughout their absurdly long lives, they question the Ineffable Plan and the orders they receive, realizing, at a certain point, that things are not so black and white but a multitude of colours, depending on where the light hits. Or maybe the Chinese got it right all along and life is simply Yin and Yang.

This book is also a historical fiction work of art, because we see how different Historical moments were and were not affected by both angels - “It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people.”

And truly, we see how humanity’s problems haven’t changed that much throughout time: despite living for so long, men never solved the problem of Death, War, and Famine, our Achilles’ heels (the Plague was substituted by Pollution thanks to Medicine, but Science breakthrough created a new Evil). We’re constantly faced with our own stupidity and knack for ruining everything we touch. Like Crowley says, humans always got the best of him: every time he tried to come up with something bad, Humans came up with something 99999 times worse.

Oh, the humour! Spicey, dark and poignant, just the way I love my chocolate. And to be honest, this story is just a constant series of “burns” to us all while at the same being just the right cup of tea: it’s an ode to feminists, to music and dance fans, to philosophers and historians and even to foodies.

Honestly, and I’m not even afraid to say this, I think I found my Bible.