Good Omens – Brilliantly Clever!

Firstly, this is not my normal type of book, in fact I don’t think I have even read any Terry Pratchet or Neil Gaiman before. I only picked this up to read after seeing the trailers for the new Amazon Prime series ‘Good Omens’ starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen and knew that I would have to read it before I could watch it. I am currently on episode 3 of 6 of the tv show and can’t wait to watch the last three episodes now that I have finished the book.

In Good Omens we have the Angel Aziraphale and his devilish counterpart Crawley, both of whom have been stationed on earth since the beginning of  time and have come to a mutual arrangement of leaving each other alone but helping each other out here and there with an odd miracle or temptation just to keep the scales on the balance of good and evil even, over the millennia they have grown rather fond of the earth and dare I say it, of each other. All this is coming to an end though as it is the end times and the apocalypse is upon us, or it will be in 11 years when the antichrist is grown up. 

Our story starts with Crawley delivering the antichrist to the Chattering Order of St Beryl, a group of demonic nuns who are supposed to switch the new born antichrist baby for the new born child of the American Ambassador, of course this goes wrong and the antichrist is instead giving to a perfectly normal couple called the Young’s. Believing that the Antichrist is with the American ambassador Crawley becomes the child’s nanny in order to tempt him towards the dark side, and Aziraphale the friendly gardener to tempt him towards the light ( remember it’s all about balance as Crawley and Aziraphale’s plan is that if they keep cancelling out each other’s influence the child will not grow up to be neither good nor bad but instead normal, thus Armageddon is avoided and the angels, demons and everyone else gets to keep on living on earth.) Of course, it takes our two 11 years to realise that they have the wrong child and that all this time the antichrist, now called Adam Young, has been growing up completely free from the influence of both heaven and hell in the village of Tadfield and now the end of days is upon us.

I have just finished reading this book and I am already wondering when I can re-read it as it is fully of little details and comments that while I identified a lot of them ( such as the M25 motorway being an invention of Crawley and is actually a demonic symbol), I reckon there are many more undiscovered gems in this book left for me to discover.

The Amazon Prime series of the same name starring David Tennant and Michael Sheen is supremely awesome and well worth a watch!

Happy Reading

Kate