Good Omens Review

For this book review, I’m going to begin by talking about a television show.  A few years ago, Amazon Prime released a television adaptation, one of those mini-series, of the Neil Gaiman-Terry Pratchett collaboration Good Omens, and it was amongst the best and most faithfully adapted pieces I’ve ever seen.  It captured almost perfectly what I vaguely remembered of the book from when I read it many years prior, was wonderfully acted, superbly scripted, and beautifully rendered.  When I watched it, after I finished recommending it to everyone who would listen and watching it a second time, I told myself I should really go back and re-read the book…but I never did.  If you’re a long-time follower, you’re not the least surprised.

There’s a second season coming out (it may have come out, by the time this post goes live), supposedly based on notes that Pratchett and Gaiman made together for a sequel before the former passed away, which was finally enough to prompt me to go back and re-read the book.  We’ll see if the sequel season can live up to the expectations engendered by the first – a heavy lift, to be certain, because re-reading Good Omens reminded me just how remarkable the television adaptation really is.

However, I shouldn’t spend this entire book review comparing the book and the show, because the book is excellent on its own merits, without any comparison.  It has Terry Pratchett’s signature satirical humor mixed with Neil Gaiman’s magic-is-normal-in-the-real-world style (for more discussion of this latter idea, see my review for Thistlefoot).  The characters and their relationships are vividly rendered, so that you can veritably hear them speaking off of the page, and the core conflict is a brilliant way of rendering the apocalypse.  This is a book about the end of the world, but if anything, it is an optimistic book, a book that expresses hope in humanity while calling out its less savory aspects.  That concept happens to be where I expect the sequel (in television form) to pick up, and I’d be very interested to read the novel version if Neil Gaiman were to publish such a piece.

While Gaiman’s writing is almost always excellent, he’s not a go-to author for me because his books are just a little darker, more surrealistic than fantastic, for my usual tastes.  Pratchett, on the other hand, is sometimes almost too light, too silly, at least to read in large doses (he’s excellent when you just need a quite escape that still has some seriousness, and real plot and character and substance to it).  Together, they balance out those tendencies in each other and produce a product in Good Omens that really should be the poster child for this kind of writing.  I wish they had more collaborations, because I can’t imagine them producing anything but excellence.

Shelving Good Omens must be a challenging task, and I wonder if that’s why it’s not more popular than it is.  It’s not quite fantasy, it certainly doesn’t fit with other apocalyptic novels, it’s definitely not urban fantasy, it probably shouldn’t be called a fairy tale, I can’t imagine how many people would be offended if it were shelved with religious fiction, and surrealistic fiction has a whole different connotation.  Fortunately, I don’t have to shelve it anywhere; I just have to write a book review.  Whatever kind of writing you like, I think that you’ll enjoy Good Omens.  Just don’t wait too long, or it might be the end of the world.