STUPID GAY BITCHES

Re-Reading Good Omens After Fifteen-Plus Years: A Review

[I a so sorry I didn’t get a chance to finish it before the show dropped the way i wanted - I had to bow out of Tumblr for most of the last few weeks to focus on a project. Bugger bugger bugger. Here it is now, later that I would have liked. Apologies, gentle readers. Spoilers, obviously for the whole book] I last read Good Omens some fifteen to seventeen years ago for probably the tenth or even twentieth time. I read it a lot. In the heady days of... I want to say grade ten?... no book seemed smarter, wiser, made me laugh more, and me feel smarter for having read it. I think my order of operations was all the Discworld books (up to, or just before, Night Watch) -> Good Omens ->  Sandman, with the later changing how I understood the nature of story itself (but that’s for another day.) I suspect that Good Omens, along with The West Wing, Tolkien, and The Golden Compass, along with an enormous Colonial Chip on my shoulder (and a pretentious stick up the ass) eventually led me to becoming a Classicist after a brief and dreadful dalliance with the theatre. At the very least it certainly helped. So, what do I know think of Good Omens, a book I once read at least ten times (probably more) back when I re-read favourite books the way other people  breathed often? (i.e. with constant regularity) Well, it’s not bad. It is not a bad book. It’s just not a great book. It’s not a terribly… cohesive book. It reads exactly like the kind of book that might get written if you and a fellow writer swapped a floppy disc back and forth in the mail a bunch of times adding bits as you went. Which, of course, is exactly what it is. The things I remember about the book remain as good as I remember  them being - which is a shame because all the really good bits I remember about the book are, with a few exceptions, in the first half (Death still incorrectly says Revelations instead of Revelation in the second half like I remember. He’s still wrong, and it’s still weird given that the right name is in the book earlier more than once.) Everything goes rapidly downhill the moment Armageddon actually kicks off...  something of a problem in a book about Armageddon whose entire second half is Armageddon. I remember Aziraphale and Crowley being great together. What I didn’t remember is that they spend most of the book apart, a crime because they’re at their best bouncing off one-another and far weaker solo, especially Crowley who really only has Hastur to talk to and he’s not a great conversationalist. If I could ditch Crowley Drives Really Hard and swap it for A&C Do Shit Together  I would. I remember Newt and Anathema becoming a couple. What I didn’t remember is that they are entirely superfluous to the narrative, as are the prophecies of Agnes Nutter herself. I kept trying to remember why it is that Newt and Anathema needed to be at the military base - turns out they don’t. Newt doesn’t even stop the countdown, that’s all Adam willing it otherwise. N&A then wander over to the main group and just kind of stand around. The only purpose of the prophecies is to give Aziraphale an idea of where Adam is. That’s it. This is extremely frustrating because Anathema talks about how working-out prophecies has allowed her family to triumph down the ages, and it sets Agnes up as someone who was executed for being a truth teller - for being an other - even though one day her prophecies would be so important for the world. But they're not! Their one tangible impact on the plot is to have Aziraphale make a phone call that he immediately hangs up. the prophecies only document the end of the world, they are irrelevent to the aversion of the End Times, which feels like one of several moments where the book Is Making A Point About Human Nature And Reader Expectations but is undone by my old friend lousy framing. Toy cannot position someone as having “they know not what they do” importance and then just not follow-through on that. There is, I think, a sense in the book that What It’s All About is quiet humanism: that the story isn’t really about Armageddon, but the smaller human stories that happened around it: Newt and Anathema falling in... love, I guess?  Mindy Newt: Homer Anathema, What’s wrong? Homer Anathema: Like you don’t know! We’re going to have sex! Mindy Newt:: Oh … We don’t have to. Homer Anathema: Yes we do! The cookie Book told me so

Or Shadwell and Madame Tracey. And that’s great - that’s a great theme. But the book fails to pull it off - largely, I think because once Armageddon kicks off it loses the human dimension its trying to argue is important for keeping the planet grounded, not because its trying to make that point, but because the authors get so distracted by writing a bunch of crazy Armageddon stuff that the actual important work - like fleshing-out characters and their stories properly - goes away in the hurly-burly of Important Shit Going down.

Take Adam. Adam lacks any real sense of interiority and wears his heart on his sleeve, which makes the will-he, won’t-he nature of Armageddon on which the whole book rests have... well, zero weight. Will Adam give in to his more evil nature? No. Of course he won’t. It’s not even a case of “of course he won’t ‘cause I know how stories go don’t I ain’t I clever” - it’s that Adam has no evil nature. None at all. A bit of child-like self-absorption , but that’s it. The book climaxes with Aziraphale realizing that the AntiChrist won’t pick sides because he is neither entirely Good or Evil - he is Just A Human, and therefore kind of both. The book has done a great job showing that duality of humanity: Mr. young, for example, isn’t a bad man. Nor is he a good one. He’s an average man, with all sorts of awful little prejudices and thought patterns, but equally enough basic decency that nobody could call him a monster anymore than a saint. So often in the book people do Bad Things without being depraved lunatics - they just get caught up in the churning mediocrity of life, what Arendt dubbed the ‘banality of evil’ after the Eichmann trial. The telemarketers aren’t child killers, and they don’t deserve their (frankly sickening and brutal) deaths - but every day they hurt people in small, irritating, vexing ways, perpetuating some horrid not because they’re nightmares but because it’s just their job. Again, that’s great. That’s why the first part of the book is the strongest: it’s full of the kinds of humanity you don’t normally see in literature outside of the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B. Desperately ordinary people - the real kind of ordinary, not the ordinary that tends to turn into anime heroes. But Adam isn’t ordinary. Not remotely. The book says this again and again, calling him a young Adonis, alluding to his unearthy Luciferian beauty, to his passions, to his commanding voice, to his leadership skills. His friends adore him, and for all that they might get argumentative with him the sheer god-like weight of his Presence cannot be ignored.  So when Aziraphale explains:

"He was left alone! He grew up human! He's not Evil Incarnate or Good Incarnate, he's just… a human incarnate.” 

My response is a rather limp “Um, well... no. No he’s not.”

“Aha!” I hear you cry. “The book’s not saying he’s ordinary, it’s saying he’s the embodiment of humanity: all their vices and virtues are amplified within him, and that’s why he has superhuman powers.” To which i reply that yeah, it’s certainly what the book is insisting in the case. But it’s not demonstrated within the text. I said above Adam lacks interiority: what you see is what you get. And what you get has zero amplification of evil. Adam seems like a genuinely good kid - in fact he is such a good kid that the book actually makes a point of commenting on how he is basically living in a parodic homage of a Boy’s Own Adventure novel. If Jack Trent, Frank Hardy, Tom Swift, and half the cast of Aladdin Paperbacks‘ first decade of publishing rolled up in a clown car and asked Adam if he wanted to hang, he’d fit right in. And they’re all painfully decent people. Adam status as a “troublemaker” - that is, even the vaguest implication that he is capable of “mischief” - is undermined by the book highlighting that the kind of people who complain about that sort of thing are Doddering Tory Blowhards like R. P. Taylor who wouldn’t know fun if it dressed like Margaret Thatcher and dry-humped their legs.  For Adam to be the incarnation of humanity there has to be a sense that he is more human than human - that his capacity for good and his capacity for evil are so great that with him him the form of gestalt of pure humanity. But that’s rubbish. Because Adam does nothing the book seems to think is worthy of meaningful censure, or at least nothing that literally any child might do as well (like ruining his sisters dress while dunking her in the water). If the best the book can do to balance out Adam’s Local Boy Heroically Saves Summer Camp And Solves The Mystery Of The Puzzle Riddle Enigma is that well he’s kind of inward facing like every other 12 year old then, well... that really takes the wind out of the book’s big summating point. The same kind of language that gets used about Adam feel like you could copy past it into a Discworld book to describe Carrot Ironfoundersson.

So when, as happens. the book shows Adam coming Into his power and talk about Remaking The World, we don’t have to think he will and that all is lost - we know how to read stories, we’re not idiots. But we should at least have a passing moment of worry that he could had the circumstances been slightly different - that he, poised on the edge of good and evil, could go either way were it not for the redemptive power of his ordinary human upbringing keeping him ground. Which, I think is safe to say, is the conclusion the book puts forward. But there is no ‘could.’ Of course he won’t - there’s no tension there at all. The book kills it stone dead, in fact, when it notes that:

Seems to me it ought to be rolled up and started all over again," said Adam. That hadn't sounded like Adam's voice.

and

Adam wasn't listening, at least to any voices outside his own head.

Adam is described as basically being possessed - at the most critical point of Armageddon, when the AntiChrist is placed to make a choice not even between Good and Evil but between The Harbinger Theological Inevitability and Sod All That Let’s Just Keep Living Because I’m A Human it is no choice at all because Theological inevitable is distinctly described as being separate from who Adam is. Which is dreadful! Adam is American Dennis the Menace - he sometimes get Into Mischief and Breaks A Vase or Ruins A Garden but he’ll still hang out being a friend to a lonely old coot - when he ought to be much closer to the British Dennis the Menace - an monster of a child who spent most of his seventy years of existence essentially bullying gay kids (”softies”) but also, now and again, when the moon’s aligned, showed a Heart of Gold under his menacing exterior. Adam didn’t need to be BritDennis, but he damn well needed some kind of edge to him - a REAL edge, not ‘well he can be bossy’ or ‘he had devilment in his eyes’ or ‘he could be thoughtless.’ Adam needed to have scenes of him being a little shithead: not killing pets, but at least being spiteful or snide or capable of sin. In To Kill A Mockingbird Jem destroys Mrs. Dubose's flowers in a fit of pique. That’s something. Adam? Nothing. So there’s nothing to hang the tension on, and any time to book has any anxiety about Adam’s moral character it rings hollow, because Adam is fundamentally decent and good and nothing so much as feints at the idea that any part of him might be otherwise.

Plus, to bring it back to the prophecies being useless, Adam gets upset about the state of the world because he borrows some of Anathema’s Save The Wales magazines, which he would never have been able to do had the Book not made her go to Tadfield in the first place. Now the book has a certain “Butterfly Flaps Its Wings” mindset - sometimes it’s the little things that put big things and motion.  

But it’s muddled, because it implies that Armageddon is nothing but a last-minute whim of a mercurial child: which is great for when the plot of your book is a deconstruction of the idea of Inevitability, but a bit rubbish when the OTHER major theme of your book is that human evil is in ordinary narrow-mindedness. The idea of a story where everything builds up to Armageddon - but Armageddon fails to arrive like an eschatological Godot, (leaving everyone standing around a bit puzzled) is a great theme for an ironic novel. But it clashes again and again with the theme of the book’s first half- that humanity is more creatively terrible and kindly virtuous than any devil and or angel could hope to be. The corollary of that ought to be that when Armageddon arrives it is precisely because of that human fallibility. Having all this build up and have it massively fizzle out can work, when written right - The Real Treasure Was The Friendships You Made is always funny when handled correctly. But Good omens builds up to things and drops them half a dozen times in the finale, which ends up not seemingly like comedic point but an inability by two authors to "bring the story home” and tie any of their threads together. I mean take the actual act of Armageddon itself: when Adam starts making the world go doo-lally, we keeping hearing reports of the world getting more agitated: we can see the shape of Armageddon begin to emerge, but because we’re still clever buggers and have read our Eliot we know that what’s likely to break the world isn’t going to be bang but a whimper: General John Amerioman gets off the phone agitated by a telemarketers, years at his secretary until she cries so she forgets to inform him that President McSmith called and because he didn’t call her back the President fails to get the advice she needs and makes a foolish error that pisses-over the Russian president who is then gets petty about something else and on down the line until a series of understandable but critical failures of empathy - don’t yell at your secretary, don’t cold-call people about duct cleaning - sets the table for the nuclear. That Adam stops it is because he shares that same fallibility and knows that punishing humanity for it as a requirement for Divine Inevitability would be unconscionable. But when Armageddon arrives, humanity has literal dick-all to do with it. We get this lovely buildup with the Four Horsemen the entire book - Revelation says they will be present at the Day of judgement so its time to get the band back together. The narrative of the book fixates of the Four Horseman’s ride to the airbase, with the understanding that once they arrive Armageddon will begin because everyone is congregating on that place at this time. So the Four Horseman arrive and... and the disguise themselves as some generals to get on the base, they break into a computer vault, and then... Jesus, War personally fucks with a computer and then Pollution personally corrodes the counter measure systems with Death and Famine stand around and watch (so much bloody standing around watching the plot happen in the part of the book) them do it, at which point all the nuke silos all over the world open up and countdown begins. What. THE FUCK? Humanity is irrelevant to the end of the world, exception in the broadest sense where they had these destructive weapons in the first place.  But they also had extensive security systems that the book notes are really good until Two Supernatural Beings Broke In And Destroyed Them. There is no human element in Armageddon: all that chatter on the radio about rising tensions and increased stress? Meaningless. The book’s whole point about evil lurking in the hearts of every ordinary person - that really anyone is capable of being good or evil on a given day, and that one angry secretary is as capable of starting the end times because of a telemarketer as any raving dictator with their finger on the button? Irrelevant. As much as War and Pollution are said to be mere embodiments of humanity’s failings, existing solely in ‘THE MINDS OF MAN” (baffling in and of itself had Pestilence not been swapped-out for Pollution, because lets be honest that would have meant waving a hand at everything from the Black Death to AIDS and calling its source moral failing which what the fuck, T&N?), they’re all actually characters with agency and personality and will. Which means within the context of what’s happening Armageddon is caused by two characters going out of their way to FORCE it to happen.

(It’s! Shit! The book right here? Shit. All the keen oft-comedic insight as to the nature of the human condition  is throw away in this moment. A book that seems so devoted to making a reader think seriously about complacency, about letting evil slip on by because its not wearing a big scary mask (and god how prescient that seems in times like these - how horrible correct it was that we were complacency in the 80s and the 90s and didn’t notice the evil rising all around us), drops the ball here and doesn’t require humanity for its climax.

"I don't see what's so triflic about creating people as people and then gettin' upset 'cos they act like people," said Adam severely. "Anyway, if you stopped tellin' people it's all sorted out after they're dead, they might try sorting it all out while they're alive.”

That’s a great sentiment, Adam. Only nobody is this moment is cross about people acting like people because nobody had - the world nearly ended because some Non-people willingly broke shit. Also, in the context of the novel - it being détente and glasnost and the Tear Down This Wall speech and Zhao Ziyang making reforms in China and on and on - as far as anyone could tell people WERE working it out. The book notes this explicitly, in fact:

“...reports available to us would seem to, uh, indicate an increase in international tensions that would have undoubtedly been viewed as impossible this time last week when, er, everyone seemed to be getting on so nicely.”

Again: Armageddon isn’t caused by people. So when Adam tells Heaven that if they just back off people might be able to sort things out for themselves, well... they seemed to have been doing just that, book.You yourself said so. And the end times were brought about by non-human actors.)

So Adam and his friends confront the Horseman and “defeat” them through some last minute cosplay. Why? No clue. The imagery is great but I don’t know why they do it - the Four Horseman are heralds of the end times, and perhaps its chorus, but now they’re villains that need to be defeated I guess (even though Adam fixes what they did with a wave of his hand anyway). Newt and Anathema arrive on the scene because Agnes Nutter told them to, and they get to the computer, and now maybe poor bumbling Newt is going to have to fix a computer when he’s only ever broken them while Anathema... stands there Jesus God... except... except Adam waves his hand and fixes the computer making Newt’s presence irrelevent. Well, still, more book to go, maybe they can pull something good out of this. Armageddon may have fizzled out, but it’s still The Day of Judgement and the Last Battle. Newt and Anathema might not have fixed the computer, but the are here at the airbase, and they make the most of it by doing nothing, providing nothing, and being needed for nothing. Shadwell and Madame Tracey are there - Shadwell is the vessel for Aziraphale, and once he’s out he stands at the sides with A&C and prepares to march with them on the combined hordes of hell and heaven. Except that that doesn’t matter because Adam makes a gesture and gives a nice speech that’s sadly unrelated to to the world as described by Good Omens up to this point, and the Hordes of Heaven and Hell shuffle their feet and decided to go home for a bit to have a good long think about some things ha ha ha how droll. And the Then, oh no, SUDDENLY Satan himself appears - I guess its time to take our issues to upper management, surely Godot- I mean God - will come to and - oh, nope, Adam waved his hand again and its just Mr. Young in his shitty car (that really should have been a Wasabi what the heck, T&N?). It’s anti-climatic. I don’t mean from a standpoint of dramatic irony, I mean everything falls apart in the book as the story comes to a screeching halt. Here you have a reasonable collection of painfully ordinary people (hella white and straight people, but its 1990 we’re not terribly woke yet) - not Generals, not Presidents or Prime Ministers, not Corporate Titans or Dictators or anyone “Important” - just ordinary people present at the End of the World. And what is it in the ineffable plan that requires all these people’s presence at the End Times? Nothing really. Just think about this for a moment. Think about what OUGHT to have happened here. Not a battle, not a fight, not a war - we know from Endgame how disappointing it is to have to sit through a big dumb set piece battle that nobody seems to want: boring slog. No, what OUGHT to have happened is the power of humanity: that these ordinary nobodies come together and halt the end times, make the Legions of Heaven & Hell see - if not reason - then at least reconsider what’s happening, or even confront Satan himself not with the virtue of Saints but simply because they have what made Aziraphale and Crowley fall in love with the Earth the way they did: the charm of humanity. If an angel and a demon can both be redeemed by the love of humanity’s virtues and vices, its deeps and faults, then why couldn’t Satan himself do the same? Well, because Adam fixed everything with a few hand waves and a pissy speech so that’s all that solved. nobody but him needed to be there - not even A&C, who just end up commenting on the action while standing around like everyone else. It’s barmy. No wonder my brain erased it, choosing to remember the book at its best when it was still scaled to humanity. The book ends up having failed to make any of its points stick - the ordinary evil men do has nothing to do with Armageddon so its probably not something we should be terrible concern about - that just us loveable old humans doing as humans do. We learn that if Heaven and hell just stepped back and let people talk things out maybe the world would get better - but that was the case at the start of the book (prologue notwithstanding), and nothing that happened in the book adjusted that in any way.It has a point to make about the unfairness of Moral duality in Theology - except that Adam is parodically virtuous and contains no real evil so.. yeah, Good is great, actually, what was the point you were making, book? The book has a point to make about the value of ordinary people: if you need someone to stand around and observe shit get ordinary people, they’re great last standing around and not meaningfully doing anything.

And don’t even get me started on things like Anathema’s passivity. Look at her character: she passively lives her life by the prophecies until the day after the End Times Newt says ‘hey do you want to be a descendent for the rest of your life’ and Anathema has an epiphany - Oh, No, I Don’t, I Want to Live my Own life On Its Own Terms - and then they burn the sequel Agatha wrote instead of following it. But that’s… aaargh, Jesus, so many problems with that. The moment of epiphany is meaningless because if Agnes-The-Prophet (who would presumably have known that her manuscript was to be burnt) hadn’t sent it, Anathema was free anyways and would have had to live her life as such regardless. You could argue ‘but this way it becomes an active choice rather than a passive acquiescence to something she can’t change’ but the problem is that her decision isn’t rooted in anything except a comment Newt makes. Nothing happened to Anathema that has in any way affected her relationship to Agnes Nutter or her life as a decedent: in the book Anathema talks a lot about prophecies, lends a kid some magazine, boinks a guy who crashed his car, takes him to a military base, does nothing while watching the world end, goes home and boinks the guy again, and then has her memories of a large portion of the last day or so erased by the Anti-Christ. So when Newt asks ‘do you want to be a professional decedent all your life” why would she say “no”? She’s spent her life devoted to the prophecies, even become a watch as some kind of career, and what sense do we have in the story that she is dissatisfied with that? The only disappointment we get is that she’s kind of let down by Newt being not terribly handsome - but that’s Newt’s issue, not Agnes’. The book wants Anathema to realize that she is now ‘free” of living by prophecy - but she doesn’t ever give the sense that she feels imprisoned by prophecy. She seems to feel like its a mark of distinction, and nothing over the last day - even the shit she can’t remember - has done anything to change that. There’s a version of this story where  Anathema repeatedly demonstrates that she feels powerless in life: that all her choices were chosen for her, even something as outré as becoming a witch, and so when Newt asks her that question she looks back over the events of the last few days - or even her life - and makes the decision to say ‘no’ as a natural extension of her recent experiences. In this version of the book she and Newt would have to have  actively made choices at the airbase of their own free will in contradiction of what Agnes said MUST and WILL happen, and because they did that things are better than Agnes said they would be. 

But that doesn’t happen, and instead we get the version where Anathema burns the sequel because Newt’s in her life now and having a man to point out the obvious is what all women need. That’s not what the book is trying to say but this-time-round that’s how it read to me. If Newt had had to run up to London for a couple days and she got the manuscript in the mail she would have kept it, because why wouldn’t she? 

(Gosh, Newt. One last point: I hated Newt. Maybe ‘schlubbly ordinary dope who gets the girl’ was revolutionary in 1990 but thirty years of pathetic nerd heroes getting the girl have left me only able to focus on the pathetic. He gets to be the the Jen to Anathema’s Kira - a completely useless dolt who gets lead around by a capable woman who knows everything and has all the skills  but he still gets to be The Hero because, well, he’s the dude. He gets to bumble around the missile computers at the climax at the book, framed as a hero while Agetha stands there and pleads with him to fix things. He spends his time getting horny for Anathema and thinking sadboy ‘maybe I’ll get to touch a girl for once’ crap  - which made my skin crawl oh sweet Jesus. Basically just fuck that guy and his whiny Pitiful Loser Nerd attitude.)

Look, when the book is good, it is SO GOOD. “Shadwell hated all Southerners and, by inference, was standing at the North Pole” is one of the great lines of literature. Famine and the dieting meals that kill you? Genius. The individual prophecies of Agnes? Wonderful. Shadwell seeing her in a vision (which, alas, comes to nothing because Shadwell having a change of heart about witches comes to nothing really)? Poignant. The Hell’s Angels? Wonderous. The incredible, perfect, oh god I adore is so much defence of the virtues of Rural English life at its best - full of foibles, yes, painfully human, yes, liable to contain shitty old Tories who put people into power who’ll plow it all under for suburbs, yes - but yet, at the same time, wonderful, too. Worth preserving. Worth fighting for. yes yes a thousand times yes let’s seeing a song about it:

Sure, some of the stuff hasn’t aged well (there’s a bit abut First Nations people that comes to mind), but most of it has - and some of it as bold for its time as it remains now. I frequently found myself thinking “this book is much too complicated for Tumblr” - the Tumblr world of Good or Bad doesn’t really have room for Shadwell, the indiscriminate racist with the heart of gold. Parts like that had me shaking with laughter - I can still recite whole scenes to you with manic glee. But the ending is a mess. It’s bad, actually - just outright bad. The book starts great. It ends terribly. It’s a crushing disappointment to go back too - and when I heard the story on the show was going to be super-faithful to the books I went “shit - but the book’s a bit rubbish on the story front. All the good bits are the characters interacting and the side stories and comedic asides - the actual story is a confusing mess.” That’s why I hope Neil Gaiman brought the writing chops that gave us The Doctor Wife and not, y’know, Nightmare in Silver.

In conclusion: man I remember Good Omens being a whole lot better. (Also, I remember more of Adam’s Gang having more to do, and they didn’t, and they’re all great and that’s a shame.)