Don’t go into the burning bookshop, you’ll only confuse the fireman. It’s time for part three of Good Omens!
Summary
It’s Saturday, and the delivery man has arrived at the river Uck, which used to be lovely and is now horribly polluted. Chalky is waiting there, enjoying the view. The delivery man gives him a package, which contains a silver circlet with diamonds that turns black in Chalky’s hands. The delivery man has one more delivery, with specific instructions. He leaves a note to his wife, crosses the road and is hit by a lorry. Death comes to collect him and he delivers no package, but a message to him: Come and see. Shadwell sends Newt to Tadfield after making sure he has his kit. Newt gets into his Wasabi, a car he named Dick Turpin, and sets off. On his way to Tadfield, he gets pulled over by a UFO and some aliens, who come with messages of universal peace and question the size of the Earth’s ice caps. We learn about the burning of Agnes Nutter, the only witch in England ever burned at the stake; she took the entire town with her by lining her petticoats with gunpowder and roofing nails. She was set aflame by an ancestor of Newt’s, in fact, a Witchfinder Major named Thou-Shalt-Not-Commit-Adultery Pulsifer.
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Defekt
The Them are discussing more things Adam has learned from Anathema’s magazines when Dick Turpin crashes nearby (on account of Tibetans digging a hole up from one of their tunnels beneath the surface of the Earth). They take Newt to Jasmine Cottage, where Anathema was already waiting patiently for his arrival. She explains about their ancestors, and about the book, telling Newt that the prophecies were basically her gift to her own descendants; the predictions aren’t clear as they could be, but they are completely bound up in what her family needs to know. Adam has decided that they could do much better with the world if he started the whole thing over, and tells his friends they can each have a part of it. Things begin to go even more berserk: trees growing in fast-forward and overtaking buildings; new rainforests appearing; a whaling boat getting swallowed by the kraken; a hurricane starting up in Tadfield and blowing out the windows of Jasmine Cottage. Newt doesn’t know what to do, but the prophecies indicate that he and Anathema sleep together, which he finds right distressing.
Back in London, the pin Shadwell stuck into Tadfield on his map of England gets too hot and blows right out of said map. He takes that as a sign that Newt is in terrible danger, but seeing as he has no money to travel, and no one nearby who he’s willing to borrow it from, he has only one choice—the southern pansy (Aziraphale). The flash Southern bastard (Crowley) isn’t an option because Shadwell is fairly certain he’s in the mafia and very dangerous. He goes out to have a word with the less-dangerous of his benefactors. Aziraphale, in the meantime, is dithering in his shop because he knows he should get in touch with his superiors when he really just wants to talk to Crowley. He closes up and does the ritual to get in touch with Heaven, telling the Metatron that he knows where the Antichrist is. Heaven doesn’t care much because they’re keen for the war to begin. They will win, obviously. The Metatron asks when Aziraphale will be joining them, so he insists on closing shop properly to get out of being recalled right then. He calls Crowley and gets the answering machine. Then he calls his second line and gets Crowley, but the demon is preoccupied with “an old friend.”
Before the two can have a proper conversation, Shadwell makes his presence known in Aziraphale’s bookshop, thinking that the duo have been using him for evil work. He takes out the (wrong) items to exorcise Aziraphale, while the angel tries to keep him out of the circle he used to contact Heaven because that would be fatal to the man. In the process, Aziraphale steps into the circle himself and vanishes. Shadwell believes he has done his sacred duty, banishing a demon from the earth, and leaves, knocking over a lit candle on his way out. Crowley is in his immaculate flat, panicking, when Hell calls up to ask why Warlock doesn’t seem to be the Antichrist. They tell Crowley they are sending people to pick him up so he can be punished for this mess. Crowley carefully props a bucket of Holy Water over the door to his office, which kills Ligur, but leaves Hastur to deal with. Crowley threatens him with a plant mister that he claims has more Holy Water in it, but Hastur doesn’t buy it. Crowley gets a call from Aziraphale, but the angel hangs up before he can find out what he wanted. Crowley decides to bluff Hastur, claiming that this was all a test, and he’s been selected to lead the legions of the damned in the upcoming war. Then he vanishes into the phone line and Hastur vanishes after him.
Crowley tricks Hastur by getting out of the phone lines right as his phone switches to the answering machine, trapping Hastur there. He gets into the Bentley and heads for Aziraphale’s shop. Shadwell comes back home and Madame Tracy can see that he’s in a state, so she insists that he have a lie down in her bedroom while she prepares for séance clients in the main room. Crowley arrives at the bookshop to find it ablaze. He walks in despite the presence of firefighters, finds Agnes’s book but no angel, gets back into the Bentley, and drives off.
Commentary
We finally get the proper introduction to Death in this section, and this one causes no small amount of confusion with fans because… well, to start, both Pratchett and Gaiman are known for writing popular versions of Death as a character. This one is far closer to Pratchett’s version: He speaks in all-caps; he’s got a dry sort of wit about him; he’s got those blue stars for eyes; he’s a great big skeleton with a scythe. But—and it is very important to make note of it—this is not Discworld’s Death. They are close, maybe you could even say related. Perhaps in Pratchett’s view all Deaths are like this, but they must be tied to certain places rather than the entire universe. This one obviously has to answer to a Christian-centered mythos, and it’s likely that they stuck with a version closer to Pratchett’s rendering because his Death is lifted from the Western European personification of Death as a figure. But this version is a trifle more mysterious as a figure. More unknowable.
It’s been said before in interviews that Pratchett is largely responsible for Agnes Nutter, which probably came as less of a surprise to anyone who had read the Discworld witches books before picking up Good Omens. But here, we see his grasp on some of the historical parts of witchcraft history, specifically that most of the women punished for the practice were simply village doctors who lived their lives as they pleased at a point in time when that was not generally approved. You have to imagine that giving her an end where she gets to take out the entire village for persecuting her was Pratchett’s way of imagining a little justice for all the women who fell prey to those mobs and watched their neighbors turn on them.
With the conversation between Newt and Anathema, we see the beginnings of a reckoning around the “professional descendant” concept. Newt understandably feels that spending so much time deconstructing Agnes’s prophecies (though the marginalia the book gives us to that effect is tops) prevents Anathema’s family from living their lives. There’s a practical side to this, namely the fact that we learn Agnes isn’t always the best at “remembering” the future, or interpreting what she’s remembering. But the other side to this is the book’s conversation on the subject of free will and what that means in the grand scheme of things. After all, according to Aziraphale, free will is the only game in town, and you could argue that Anathema’s family has been at least partially eschewing it for quite some time due to the book.
It’s incredibly stressful to read through Adam circling the idea of Armageddon because, if anything, it’s more relevant today than it was when it was written. Granted, the mechanism by which he’s learning about all these catastrophes is a set of conspiracy-laden magazines, but a lot of what he and the Them find themselves worrying over are genuine problems that have only grown worse in recent years—war, animal extinction, climate change, and all the rest. When Adam starts thinking that it would be better to wipe the slate and start from scratch, you have to imagine that there are far more kids his age now who would agree. None of this stuff feels so theoretical anymore, and it makes the change that comes over Adam feel more pronounced than it did the first time I read the book.
There’s a thing that I’ve thought forever, which is that Crowley is so obsessed with appearing cool and making that appearance work for him that it loops right back around into being utterly nerdy. It doesn’t mean that I love him any less, or that I don’t think he comes off cool to most people—he clearly does because lots of people are easily fooled by a good suit and sunglasses. (I keep thinking about the note from earlier that he only ever bought petrol for the Bentley once because he wanted James Bond bullet-hole-in-the-windshield decals, and are you kidding me, there is nothing actually cool in that sentence.) But it works so beautifully in his juxtaposition with Aziraphale, who clearly has opinions about what is fashionable, but also does not care a whit whether his ideas in that regard are current or shared by others. They’re both just a different stripe of nerd.
And one does the gavotte and thinks tartan is stylish, and the other has furniture and appliances that are meant to “communicate” things about him, in a flat he rarely spends any time in.
In this section, we learn how the abuses and inadequacies of Heaven and Hell have affected both Aziraphale and Crowley on a behavioral level, which is fascinating to me. The first thing the angel thinks is that he’d rather talk to Crowley than Heaven about what he’s discovered, but he ends up contacting Heaven anyway because rules are rules. He has a completely unfruitful conversation with the Metatron, has to duck his recall orders by essentially lying, and ends up trying to get in touch with Crowley anyway because he doesn’t like the answer he got from his own people. Working with Heaven has made Aziraphale evasive, depressed, and more prone to untruths than he would like to admit.
On the other side of this we have Crowley, who has been dealing with Hell. And his reaction to the treatment by his superiors comes through in two specific ways: the Holy Water and the houseplants. Crowley is so aware of what his people might do in the event of failure that he keeps an item in his home that is completely fatal to him, on the off chance that he might need to murder a coworker one day. And the houseplants are pure projection: He’s just perpetuating the abuse he gets at work onto living things he can actually control and doesn’t feel bad for frightening. The idea is couched as something comical, but when you stop to think about it, it’s downright upsetting.
And we’re just getting started, really.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Newt believes that being in the Witchfinder Army is like being in the Sealed Knot or a Civil War reenactor, because it got you out on weekends and “meant that you were keeping alive fine old traditions that had made Western civilization what it was today.” Oh, Newt. Newt, no.
- “It would be a very precise historian who could pinpoint the precise day when the Japanese changed from being fiendish automatons who copied everything from the West, to becoming skilled and cunning engineers who would leave the West standing.” Oof. Look, the less cringe version of that joke happened several years before this book came out in Back to the Future, when Marty McFly tells Doc Brown that all the best stuff is made in Japan, and this… this version is not doing that. There are a few jokes in this section like that, and they pull me right out of the book every time.
- Anathema gives a list of inventors she has studied who created things so simple and useful, people forgot they needed to be invented. But the real joke here is talking about things that are often named after the people who invented or popularized them. Things like braille, the Faraday cage, leotards, and Tupperware, and so on. Stuff that’s so commonplace that it never really occurs to you to wonder how it got that name.
- It always kind of makes me chuckle that the point when we find out Crowley’s eyes are still snake eyes is supposed to be a sort of “reveal” in the narrative. For whatever reason, it just never particularly shocked me, so the dramatics around it were always more cute than they were surprising.
Pratchettisms/Gaimanisms:
He looked like how Victorian Romantic poets looked just before the consumption and drug abuse really started to cut it.
A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them.
“You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you?”
I suppose I’m meant to feel a wave of warm, tender female something-or-other about this, she thought.
It wasn’t a full-cased grandfather clock, but a wall clock with a free-swinging pendulum that E. A. Poe would cheerfully have strapped someone under.
The whole point about gangsters and cowboys and aliens and pirates was that you could stop being them and go home.
Speed it up, and the sound a tree makes is vroooom.
He ought to tell Crowley.
No, he didn’t. He wanted to tell Crowley. He ought to tell Heaven.Nothing is more reassuring, nothing is more true to the comfortable spirit of English occultism, than the smell of Brussels sprouts cooking in the next room.
Next week we will read up to “‘Right,’ he said. And he went inside.”
To me the key parts of this section are Adam’s growing power, which is still funny, and Heaven and Hell’s disinterest in him except as a time and place for their apocalyptic battle, which is not.
Heaven and Hell are both massive bureaucracies dedicated to the final battle. Like so many wars of our history, they are looking for an excuse to start it, in this case the Antichrist.
The whole thing would be grim, except for the hilarious supporting cast. Personally I find Aziraphale and Crowley’s philosophical discussions most interesting and Dog’s thoughts most telling.
I always took both of those “oh no/oof” moments as critiques of that sort of mindset rather than endorsements of it.
@@@@@ 2 – agreed.
I think it’s particularly clear with the war re-enactment point. The joke’s on Newt – cosplaying war might be (somewhat) more socially acceptable than cosplaying witch-hunters, but this is a book that is definitely anti-war, so…. I think we’re expected to question Newt’s logic here. Or, alternatively: perhaps these are the traditions that have made Western Civilisation what it is, but if so, where does that leave Western Civilisation?
I’ve read this book like 7 times but I don’t think I will ever understand the Dick Turnpin thing.
@2: I’d say it’s both. We are meant to question Newt. OTOH, this, and many more traditions, here and in Terry and Neil’s other works, are indeed what made Western Civilization what it is. For better or, more often in their books, for worse.
Aside: I assume Newt’s name is from Monty Python and the Holy Grail:
BEDEVERE: What makes you think she is a witch?
VILLAGER #3: Well, she turned me into a newt.
BEDEVERE: A newt?
VILLAGER #3: I got better.
(Villager 3 is played by John Cleese)
@@.-@: Dick Turpin was a famous English highwayman in the 18th century. A highwayman holds up coaches on the road. The joke comes at the end of the book, as I recall.
Annotated Pratchett notes for this portion of Good Omens:
– [p. 123] “Red sky in the morning. It was going to rain.”
See the annotation for p. 202 of Equal Rites .
– [p. 126] “Newt’s car was a Wasabi.”
‘Wasabi’ is, in fact, a kind of horseradish used in sushi.
– [p. 127] “[…] the world’s only surviving Wasabi agent in Nigirizushi, Japan.”
And ‘Nigirizushi’ is a kind of sushi.
– [p. 129] “The one that looked like a pepper pot just skidded down it, and fell over at the bottom. The other two ignored its frantic beeping […]”
The Daleks in the television series Dr Who are robots that look very much like pepper pots. They don’t beep much, though.
R2D2 in the movie Star Wars (and sequels) is a robot that does a lot of frantic beeping. It doesn’t look that much like a pepper pot, though.
(In an earlier release of the APF, this annotation listed only R2D2 as a possibility. [The annotator] received a steady trickle of mail saying: “no, you’re wrong, it’s a reference to the Daleks.” So [the annotator] changed the annotation, which of course only led to the steady trickle changing into: “no, you’re wrong, it’s a reference to R2D2.” Clearly, we have a controversy on our hands…)
– [p. 136] “[…] a wall clock with a free-swinging pendulum that E. A. Poe would cheerfully have strapped someone under.”
See the annotation for p. 16 of Reaper Man .
– [p. 144] “‘And then giant ants take over the world,’ said Wensleydale nervously. ‘I saw this film. Or you go around with sawn-off shotguns and everyone’s got these cars with, you know, knives and guns stuck on –‘”
The films Wensleydale is referring to are Them! (how appropriate…) and the various Mad Max movies.
– [p. 152] “The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, […]”
‘Kappamaki’ is a Japanese cucumber roll.
– [p. 157] “‘There doesn’t have to be any of that business with one third of the seas turning to blood or anything,’ said Aziraphale happily.”
To the few particularly befuddled or atheistic readers out there who at this point of the book still aren’t quite sure what is going on, [the annotator] can only give the advice to take a closer look at Chapter 6 of the biblical Book of Revelation.
– [p. 158] “Hi. This is Anthony Crowley. Uh. I –“
Up to this point in the novel, we have only been told that Crowley’s first name begins with an ‘A’, leading to the false expectation that his name might be Aleister Crowley, as in the famous British mystic, theosophist, black-arts practitioner and “most evil man on Earth”.
– [p. 166] “‘This is a Sainsbury’s plant-mister, cheapest and most efficient plant-mister in the world. It can squirt a fine spray of water into the air.’”
Dirty Harry again. See the annotation for p. 124 of Guards! Guards! .
@0: note that Newt is distressed by the existence of prophecies about sex, not about the sex.
I’m not sure about Crowley’s obsession with Cool circling around into nerdy; I associate “nerd” as being someone who (inter alia) doesn’t try to keep up appearances. But there is a neat symmetry in A&C’s behaviors.
Is the comment about the Japanese meant to be taken seriously, or to be a reflection on how attitudes about the Japanese flipped when the West got its commercial head handed to it? (contra my previous remarks, I do remember a car in the Wasabi class; the early Corollas tended to abrade their own brake hoses in sharp turns.) cf @2?
dating the story: one of the comments-on-prophecies sets this part “in the 1990s”. So maybe 1990 or maybe later, but not 2000 as I had somehow sensed. (Although I wonder how the observer could be that specific.)
Good lines:
The British resisted decimal currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated. [I remember reading currency descriptions on the backs of Marble notebooks, ~60 years ago, and thinking that French and German currencies were boring because they didn’t have the names for coinage that the US and the UK did. Then I visited the UK and found what an un-boring coinage was like.]
When most people said “I’m psychic, you see,” they meant “I have an over-active but unoriginal imagination/wear black nail varnish/talk to my budgie”; when Anathema said it, it sounded as though she was admitting to a hereditary disease which she’d much prefer not to have.
…not just harboring [thoughts about sex], in fact, but dry-docking them, refitting them, giving them a good coat of paint and scraping the barnacles off their bottom.
Crowley had met one or two [angels] who, when it came to righteously smiting the ungodly, smote a good deal harder than was strictly necessary. [On rereading, this is a foretaste of Dogma, which thanks Good Omens in the credits — but I don’t know whether the book was the source of this specific idea or just the general attitude of the movie.]
…he had initially taken to [the gavotte] like a duck to merchant banking…
Side note: Agnes Nutter’s explosion can be heard as far away as Halifax (UK). I wonder if this was thinking of Halifax (NS), where the worst artificial pre-nuclear explosion (felt over 100 mile away) happened in 1917.
@1: To me the key parts of this section are Adam’s growing power, which is still funny, except when suddenly it isn’t — he’s clearly gone a long way toward demon mode by the end of this block, able to force his friends to march where he wants them to.
If there were witches in Old England, and they were the child-eating, cattle sickening, crop destroying variety, then being part of a Witchfinder Army would be a noble calling. So Newt signing on to what he thinks of as a quaint club with ancient ties to do-gooders makes sense.
@8: To add about Newt – he is a gangly, not close to handsome, nerd. His hopes for sex are encrusted with barnacles but they still exist. The prophecy, however, puts him in mind of a long dead ghost watching him perform.
I think the smiting comment is more directed at the police and also turns up in discussions of Colon and Nobbs.
I skipped the first two scenes of this section. I really, really didn’t need to hear again the description of Pollution blissing out beside the spectacularly-polluted River Uck.* Didn’t need it because I recall it all too well – and extrapolate. Whenever I hear of a major pollution event, be it an oil-pipe blowout or a toxic-waste spill or a repealed regulation or the wildfire that burned part of a nuclear testing lab/meltdown site in California, I see him standing at its edge, looking just like a young-adult Draco Malfoy but infinitely more evil, and grinning ecstatically at his handiwork, and I want to punch his face.
I’ve warmed to War and Famine as characters, and am indifferent to this version of Death. Trying not to despise Pollution, the most nightmarish of nightmare fuel, is much more difficult. He’s fictional, but many people passionately hate fictional characters. He may have been designed to be funny, and a pretty boy with a poet’s disposition would normally be crush fodder for me, but avatars of environmental destruction get no laughs or love from me.**
And when Death says JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH, I hate everything, especially all apocalyptic stories in particular.
Adam’s segue from environmentalist-awakening to apocalyptic ideation may have been produced by his inner Antichrist voice, but it’s unfortunately believable. There’s a breed of environmentalism which, having deeply internalized the cultural narrative of apocalypse as well as that of Eden even in the absence of consciously Biblical beliefs, yearns for the abrupt end of destructive humanity so that nature and a few humans who live in harmony with it will inherit the Earth. I felt that way on occasion, after getting my environmentalist awakening when I was slightly younger than Adam. They (and I) don’t generally want it to happen through nuclear annihilation, though, on account of everything else getting destroyed as well. Something that takes out humanity and nothing else, as portrayed in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy and intensively speculated on in Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us, would be preferred.
“We could go to Tadfield this afternoon and not have a hamburger. If all four of us don’t have one, that’s millions of acres of rainforest that won’t be cut down.” *puts hand over eyes* Oh my Drowned Deities. Soooo many people are like this, thinking that reducing our own resource consumption is all that’s needed to “save the Earth.”
“[The New Aquarian’s] editors had assumed that readers were all for saving the whales, in the same way they assumed that those readers breathed and walked upright.” Ow. Burn. But I laughed aloud when Adam “had confused visions of saving up whales until you had enough for a badge.” Before Adam goes apocalyptic, the dialogue of the Them in this section is hilarious perfection.
“If they’re so clever, what are they doing in the ocean?” Says the kid who wanted to live in sunken Atlantis.
Brian wants to “do something about” the cause of the hole in the ozone layer. Just you wait…
The planet-maintenance police scene is pure magnificence, though in this case Pollution deserves some of their ire. I love “You do know you could find yourself charged with being a dominant species while under the influence of impulse-driven consumerism, don’t you?”
The mall scene starts out so dam sad. It has lines like: “But it was a tree, and if you half-closed your eyes and looked at it over the artificial waterfall, you could almost believe that you were looking at a sick tree through a fog of tears. And “But there were times when you needed trees, and the shame of it, Jaime thought, was that his children were growing up thinking of trees as firewood and his grandchildren would think of trees as history.” Then the tree erupts through the mall, and trees erupt all over the city, and it’s a scene of pure glory, straight out of my youthful fantasies; I got happy-chills rereading it today.
A kraken (or other sea monster) swallowing a ship is another of my fantasies. But we didn’t actually see that happen here, so it left me unsatisfied. It remains overshadowed by the grim introduction. “The Kappamaki, a whaling research ship, was currently researching the question: How many whales can it catch in one week.” And then the bit about such ships returning with (or rarely without) “a factory ship full of research material.” Too real.
“We thought a multinational nuclear exchange would be a nice start.” That should’ve warned me off the first time I read it, but I was in denial about where the book would go.
I like Agnes calling the saffron-robed monks “mene of crocus.”
Agnes tried to teach people about penicillin, microbial contagion, and hygiene. This makes her a direct opponent of Pestilence, him surely (in my headcanon) being focused on preventing the discovery of this knowledge and spreading misinformation like the “bad air” belief referenced here while encouraging the creation of disease-breeding conditions, like cities where thousands of people are forced to use the same waterway as drinking source and sewer. The villagers’ disbelief of her was a victory for him, though I doubt she posed much of a large-scale threat to him in any case.
“In my heart, I’m a computer engineer; it’s only the brain that’s letting me down.” I hear you, dude. In my heart, I’m a marine biologist; it’s only the visually-impaired inability to observe marine life that’s letting me down.
*The actual River Uck is a tributary of the River Ouse. The Ouse hosted much industrial activity in past centuries and was recently deemed to have “moderate” water quality in most of its portions, but I don’t know what it was like when this book was written. It’s included in the 1086 Domesday Book, also called the Doomsday Book despite being not actually apocalyptic. Stealth pun, stealth reference, or both?
**No, not even Hexxus in FernGully, who I think of as Pollution in his true form.
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Dick Turpin’s eventual fate is still one of the funniest bits in the book.
@11 –
The Domesday Book (or Doomsday Book) did have an apocalyptic association – its name gave notice that it would be the most complete census of the Norman’s new conquests until Doomsday. That’s it, though.
Two shout forwards from a later Discworld book.
I found a description of a vampire that reminds me of my conception of Crowley. “They were… dishabille. It meant untidy but with bags and bags of style.”
As for Heaven and Hell, “the presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to the presence of those who think they’ve found it.”
@14: Thanks for pointing that out. My mind was rather tired by that point in my comment-writing. Terry Pratchett Book Club commenting: my Friday nights of reckless irresponsibility. :-p
@11 @14 @16: Gee, thanks. Now you’ve got me started down another web wormhole.
In looking into it, the Doomsday Book was not titled that by William’s surveyors, it didn’t have a title at all. It was a record of land ownership for the purpose of taxation. Later it was used by the medieval equivalent of lawyers in disputes and began to be referred to as the Doomsday Book. Doom meant judgement and Doomsday was a reference to the Biblical Judgement Day, not in the apocalyptic or eternal sense but in the sense that there was no appeal from the judgement.
If anyone is interested in delving into it, you could try https://opendomesday.org
I must be the opposite of Aerona: I’m a fan of Pollution (the fictional Horseperson, not the concept). The “romantic poet” line in Pratchettisms/Gaimanisms is what did it for me. On the other hand, Famine straight up disturbs me, to the point where I found it hard to enjoy his scenes in the book (pre-riding out). I really must write down my thoughts on these guys.
I’m happy that you put words on the fact that Death in Good Omens is clearly close to Death in Discworld, yet… not quite him. Which makes perfect sense, given that they’re from different planets. (Conversely, there is a character in a much later Discworld book that I like to think of as the Disc’s equivalent of Aziraphale.)
@18: Now I’m curious about which Discworld character you liken to Aziraphale.
Pollution is weirdly relatable, but also my opposite. His temperament is most akin to mine, and I sometimes envy the Nightmare Fetishist (thanks, TV Tropes) for the joy and wonder he finds in things I can’t stand to think about. Then I recall his role in creating those horrors, which destroy or threaten everything that gives me joy and wonder (not to mention what he’s going to do later in this book), and I’m back to hating him. It’s like we’re magnets — he’s similar to me, but positioned to powerfully repel me, and there’s no flipping either of us.
Famine really is disturbing and awful, because he’s so real. I’ve warmed to his character mostly by dint of spending the past three months mentally fanfictioning him and Frannie into a Grand Romance in defiance of canonical possibility — hey, I do whatever works — but I regularly have to kick his messaging out of my brain.
I appreciate getting to rant and ramble about the Horsepersons here. The Good Omens fan groups I frequent elsewhere online are focused on the show and consist mostly of nonstop Crowley/Aziraphale shipping. I have no objection to that activity, but it doesn’t give me much to talk about.
Aerona and Christina: What’s the opposite of two opposites? That would be me (and this is why there are so many schisms and sects). I can’t take Famine or Pollution (the characters, not the all too real problems) seriously.
Famine starts as a food exec dreaming up cereal whose only nutritional value is the milk you add to it. He transitions to a nouvelle cuisine restaurateur. He ends up as the owner of a chain of fast food joints. He preys on people but minus the name and the context I think he would be considered bad, not evil.
Pollution, OTOH, doesn’t seem big enough to deserve the capital letter His actions seem very localized at this point. I can’t see him controlling Blake’s “Dark Satanic Mills”.
BTW, if you’re not C of E, you should listen to Jerusalem for a different take on the apocalypse.
Christina: Give me a hint. The best candidate I can think of is the Librarian but we’ve met him already.
@19 and 20: The Angel of the Iron Book in Thief of Time. He only has about one page of screentime (in fact, he’s so minor that I’d understand if anyone doesn’t remember him), and is more of a quick joke than a character. But he is an angel, is associated with the Apocalypse in a way (and books!), and what we see of his personality feels pretty close to Aziraphale’s.
Agree that the fandom is very heavy on the C&A shipping (one GO deviantArt group I’ve been to was partitioned into three folders: Crowley/Aziraphale shipping art; non-shippy Crowley and Aziraphale art; and… all the other characters). Don’t get me wrong, those two are great, but the other main characters are great as well. I’m happy that you’re here to talk about the Horsepersons, because that means I don’t have to feel lonely doing it.
Have some things to add re davep1’s thoughts on their characters, but I’m at work right now…
@21: aha!
My top guesses were Brutha, Lu-Tse, and Susan, with Susan as my prime suspect (and maybe Lu-Tse as a Crowley analog but without the style, if Crowley could exist without style).
It’s possible to stop taking characters seriously. When I read Keys to the Kingdom by Garth Nix, the personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins were quite the dislikable Big Bads (except the one I’ve adored always and forever because reasons). After I read a few fanfics and wrote one of my own, I proceeded to obsessively love them for years and giggle at everything which reminded me of them. It helped that another character turned out to be worse in the end, and also that most of the seven sympathetically suffer from being aflicted by their respective sins even as they canonically cause others to suffer as a result. The Horsepersons take supreme pleasure in their impacts, and that’s harder to get past. But with my many imagined conversations and humorous mini-fanfics, I’m working on it.
@0 and All Others
It’s apparently 50 years, half a century, since Sir Terry published his first book (The Carpet People).
The Guardian has a nice article about the book and young Sir Terry that people might find interesting:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/apr/20/terry-pratchett-debut-turns-50-at-17-the-carpet-people
@15: Dictionary.com says that to be dishabille means “the state of being dressed in a careless, disheveled, or disorderly style or manner”, which seems to apply to your quote about a vampire when they are not making an effort to dress up: they never descend to “scruffy”, only to “hot mess”. At least the sexy Anne Rice vampires, not so much the grotty disgusting ones like Nosferatu.
However, another, more specific meaning of dishabille is that you simply haven’t finished dressing. Or you haven’t even started. Am I reading the wrong sort of books, that that is what comes to mind first… or would you like me to recommend some of the books? ;-)
Sir Terry Pratchett wrote some of them. If I interpret Google results correctly, in “Making Money”, Pucci Lavish tries to entrap a gentleman in her horse-drawn dishabille. If not, then never mind.
It’s what you wouldn’t or shouldn’t go out in. And I also turned up a number of online “Good Omens” fan fictions with, yes, mostly Crowley in it. Yes, those fan fictions. Maybe you’ve read them? Maybe you wrote them?
@25: The definition I quoted was from one of Pratchett’s characters, Polly in Monstrous Regiment, and, as you point out, was meant in the first sense to which she added the “bags and bags of style” herself. Note that the other quote was also her thought.
The other definition sounds like something Newt would dream of. I won’t comment on your own library.
BTW, I don’t read fan fiction and the closest I’ve come to writing any are some of my speculations in this book club.
@23 You’ve now put me in mind of one of the Bauchelain and Korbal Broach novellas (attached to the Malazan BOTF series) – The Healthy Dead, where several demons/avatars of deadly sins are affected by a puritanical purge of the city they inhabit and the absence of people indulging in those behaviours effectively depriving them of sustenance
@23 @27: It also brings to mind two minor Discworld gods – Bibulous, the god of wine who enjoys the positive effects of drinking while the negative effects are transferred to Bilious is the Oh God of Hangovers.
@28: A friend once posted on Facebook, requesting suggestions of unusual hangover cures. Knowing he was a Discworld fan, I commented “Transfer it to a deity.”
@20: First of all, gauging tone is difficult on the internet, so I’d like to make clear that while I disagree with you on the Horsepersons, I’m not trying to pick a fight or saying that your opinion on them is invalid.
Famine sells a weightloss cure to an already terminally anorexic woman, and his companies produce “food” that will either make you die of malnutrition, or become obese and then die of malnutrition. War runs guns to pre-war zones, including a site that was supposed to be the setting for a peace agreement. Pollution (only including his on-page actions here) deliberately causes an oil spill of Exxon Valdez proportions. To start with, I’d say that’s a bit more than simply “bad.”
“He preys on people but minus the name and the context I think he would be considered bad, not evil.” But their names and context are what makes them the Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. They’re not regular businessmen/journalists/technicians making unethical decisions out of greed, or desire for fame, or convenience. If they were, I’d consider them villainous, but I probably wouldn’t find them chilling. What makes them creepy, to me, is that they’re sapient entities whose main goal is to harm humans and the Earth, and by all appearances take pleasure in doing so.
I’m excluding Death from this, because he seems to be operating by the same rules as the Death of Discworld, where he doesn’t cause the death, he only comes to collect in the aftermath.
@30: Agreed; that’s why I found them so frightening as characters, too. But for me, they also shine a chilling light on humanity while tempting us to look away. The results of their (pre-apocalypse) actions are all things that happen in real life — due to human cruelty, ambition, indifference, greed, and need. We weren’t created* to slowly or quickly destroy each other and our biosphere, but we’re collectively choosing to do it anyway, and always have. It’s so tempting (and sometimes fun) to start blaming those malevolent inhuman beings for everything, rather than dwell on our own innate capacity for causing vast harm.
Nitpicks: Famine doesn’t sell Sherryl the book during his first scene. She asks him to autograph the book she had bought sometime-previously (I don’t know why she happened to have it with her in the restaurant) and tells him it had “changed her life.” And War disrupts a peace agreement in the show, but not (on-page) in the book.
*I’m uncertain about the Horsepersons’ place in this book’s theology. But I’ll ramble about that in a comment on the next post.
If you’re trying to excuse Death, the scene delivering a message to him is rather grim. On Discworld you’d just get some wizards to perform the Rite About Now to get his attention, but not too closely. In “The Colour Of Magic”, he has that parody “Appointment in Samarra” bit with Rincewind, and treats him for most of the book after that as unfinished business. Other ways to meet the Discworld Death seem to include visiting a terminally ill person and waiting, or having enough of a personal Near Death Experience to allow a conversation, just as long as it’s not more Near than you want.
@31: No, I agree with you: they definitely came from the minds of humans. I’ll go into that in more detail when I finally write my summing-up post about them.
Good catch about Famine and Sherryl. I know the failed peace agreement scene wasn’t in the book (though the scene in the show was so pitch-perfect, a splendid piece of Pratchett/Gaiman black comedy, I was actually surprised when I checked the book and it wasn’t there). However, wasn’t there a brief mention of her turning a peace agreement into a battle? Clearly, I need to re-read; I haven’t read it in years, so the show is a lot clearer in my memory.
@32: It is grim, and I think Death is darker in this book than in Discworld (though still less dark than the other Horsepersons). I see him as being more neutral than evil, but I can’t picture him having a family or a pet like his DW counterpart. There really isn’t any other way for a normal human to contact him, though. (For the record, even in Discworld, the “waiting by a deathbed” trick would only work for a wizard/witch or other “special” individual, like Mort or Susan [and I don’t really like that Pratchett handwaved it in “Theatre of Cruelty” by having Carrot interrogate Death]. A non-powered being would only meet Death when dying or having a near-death experience.)
Actually, the “minds of men” thing in-story threw me for a loop and continues to irksomely mess with my attempts at a unified understanding of these characters. So that will be a less-than-fun ramble.
As a journalist, War went to peaceful places (“where the wars weren’t”) and rather mysteriously turned them into war zones. In her first scene, she similarly turned a peaceful place into a war zone when she got stranded on her way to sell arms in a minor civil war and turn it into a major civil war. I don’t see anything about a peace agreement, though that sort of thing is imaginable.
I never noticed the significance of this before I just saw it pointed out on TV Tropes, but when Pollution signs for the crown that was originally meant for Pestilence, the pen leaks, thusly “It was a long word, and it began with a P, and then there was a splodge, and then it ended in something that might have been -ence and might have been –ion.” I have trouble picturing that (and had been trying to keep my mind’s eye closed during that scene), but…*shakes fist* Pratchett! Or more likely Gaiman!!
@35: Same here (never noticed it until TV Tropes pointed it out).
The TV Tropes entry seems to think that we’re initially supposed to be unsure whether the White Rider is Pollution or Pestilence, but I doubt it, since he’s named as Pollution already in the cast list at the start.
@36: That woule be a weird expextation, given his very explicit association with pollution in his first section. Pestilence might enjoy the sight of an extravagantly polluted river, if it was laden with disease microbes from sewage and suchlike, but he wouldn’t go around creating oil spills, working at nuclear plants, and inventing plastic. In this scene, Pollution signs for the crown with his true name as apparently required, while maybe-unintentionally making the signature look like it could have been from the crown’s original intended recipient. I wish I could know more about the details of this apocalypse-item delivery operation.