Good Omens Review

I got Good Omens for my birthday and promptly started reading it and wanted to share my thoughts not only on it, but also on how online supercuts affected my enjoyment of the book.

According to The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch (the world’s only completely accurate book of prophecies, written in 1655, before she exploded), the world will end on a Saturday. Next Saturday, in fact. Just before dinner.
So the armies of Good and Evil are amassing, Atlantis is rising, frogs are falling, tempers are flaring. Everything appears to be going according to Divine Plan. Except a somewhat fussy angel and a fast-living demon—both of whom have lived amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and have grown rather fond of the lifestyle—are not actually looking forward to the coming Rapture.

And someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist . . .

My Thoughts:

I did enjoy this book, and thought that it was quite funny. The start was really interesting and convoluted with a good relationship between Crowley and Aziraphale. However I soon realized that the book took place in a relatively short space of time. I was hoping for there to be more scenes between these two characters, and for them to have a bigger impact on the story. Instead they seemed to just be following along after the events to try and not make things worse.

An Angel who did not so much Fall as Saunter Vaguely Downwards.

No one in this books seemed to actually have done anything to create the supposed tension, and little was done to resolve it. Given that this was supposed to be the apocalypse, and the armies of both heaven and hell were ammassing to fight, there seemed to be little that actually involved decision making. Most of the characters were working on the assumption that prophecies always come true, but given that the reader was aware quite quickly that the Antichrist was not a threat and nothing was going to go wrong, the tension quickly evaporated. The whole book to me was just people going to a place, screaming at each other a bit then going home again. Because the war was yet to start, I had very little idea of what each of the armies could do, and therefore failed to see what the impact would be of the upcoming fight.

It has been said that civilization is twenty-four hours and two meals away from barbarism.

The interesting thing that affected my enjoyment of this book was the youtube supercuts from the adaptation that show Crowley and Aziraphale slowly becoming friends over thousands of years of time. These small scenes showed how wonderful these characters are together, and I was disappointed to find that a lot of them were not in the book. Instead we were left with them not really having much to do with each other, and when they do, they just annoy each other. I was left quite disappointed.