After starting my reading for this year with Brigid Kemmerer’s two Cursebreaker novels, I decided that my 3rd read of 2020 was going to be Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman’s Good Omens. The decision came about for two main reasons: a combination of word of mouth friends, and anticipation of the tv series. Perhaps most shockingly to some who might read this: I hadn’t read a single Pratchett novel before this, and the only Neil Gaiman I’ve read before was Stardust, but so long ago I can’t remember much about it. So, I figured it was about time I did something about that…

“Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don’t let you go around again until you get it right”.

The angel Aziraphale and the demon Crowley have become accustomed to life amongst mortals. So much so, that when the apocalypse is due to arrive next Saturday, they decide to do something about it. There’s only one problem: the Antichrist has been misplaced…

On paper, this book has elements of everything I really enjoy: fantasy, humour, interesting protagonists. It pains me then to say I found it such a slog. We’re clearly building to the Saturday in question and the stakes are high, but honestly discovered really quickly that I just wasn’t invested or caring enough about it – perhaps due to the long winded descriptions or tangents that happen (Newt and Anathema I’m looking at you).I found it hard to see how all the pieces fitted together because my attention drifted; and reading simply to finish it rather than through enjoyment. And by the time we got to the end, I found the resolution so anticlimactic and unsatisfying…

Which is a shame as there are things about the book I really enjoyed. At the time I read this, I was all but new to the idea of reading books by multiple authors, so that in itself was a new sensation, and there more moments where the writing could be really perceptive and moving, like one of my favourites:

““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.”

It also has moments that I found incredibly witty, sometimes laugh out loud funny. I particularly enjoyed the sections with the bikers, and the personification of the Horsepeople of the Apocalypse: Death, Famine, War and Pollution, and generally wished the intervals between laughs hadn’t been as long as they were – I’m sorry to all those friends who had told me I’d be roaring with laughter…. it seems satire and me don’t always gel!

My hit and miss relationship with its humour aside, the book uses lots of techniques that my literary geek loved. For one thing, there’s lots of irony: in Adam, the Antichrist, Dog, who is supposed to be a ferocious hellhound, I even found it amusing in Aziraphale and Crowley: their personalities should technically be swapped around given what they represent, but there’s fun in the fact they don’t behave in the way we might expect them to!

There’s also metaphors, similies and motifs aplenty, and I often found these appealed to my sense of humour more than the outright jokes did – I do love when books are cleverly styled this way and writers take pride in their techniques.

When I was roughly about 100 pages in, slowly losing the will and wondering if I should just switch to the TV adaptation, a twitter friend had said she felt the latter was more about the relationship between Aziraphale and Crowley, whereas the book is more concerned with detailing the apocalypse and its fallout. Though to date I have only yet seen one episode of the series, I completely see what she was getting at. Aziraphale and Crowley’s relationship was my favourite thing about the book – I loved their witty banter and the way they’re fleshed out and described, and I longed to see more of them together.

Elsewhere, it took me a long while to stop feeling indifferent towards which frustrated me because he is the Antichrist, the whole lynchpin of the story. His gang of mates, the Them, wound me up as well, though I can’t really explain why – I liked Pepper though, being the only girl in the group it was cool to see her as the fiesty one.

All in all, I wanted to love this one more than I did, and am unsure if I would pick it up again as often as I know friends have. Happily though it hasn’t put me off either author by any means, so if you have any recommendations for either on where I should go from here, please let me know!