What a weirdo”, never fails to crack me up – and how lightly it wears its cleverness.
I can’t wait to share how clever and silly this book is, often in the same sentence – a supernatural being thinking, “That Hieronymous Bosch. These “Nice and Accurate Prophecies” inform the characters that they’re living through the world’s last week - unless they can change the rules of the cosmic chess game. Then there’s Anathema Device, who has inherited the only accurate book of prophecy ever written, passed down over generations from her ancestor Agnes Nutter, burned in the 17th century as a witch (a demise that she did, of course, foresee). As they have more in common with each other than with anyone else on earth, above or below, their enmity has mutated over millennia into friendship. The eternal battle between good and evil is personified by the angel Aziraphale, a gently fusty rare book dealer, and the demon Crowley, a slippery individual in shades. He is the son of Satan who, thanks to a muddled baby-swap, grows up not so much the Antichrist he’s intended to be, as the ideal of a rural English mid-century schoolboy with tousled hair and a strong will. This is evident in the passages about “the Them”, the gang led by young Adam Young. The book began life as a parody of Richmal Crompton’s Just William books called William the Antichrist. Only Death never changes, having never been away. Famine sells diet foods and invents nouvelle cuisine Pestilence spreads pollution War is a glamorous global reporter stirring up trouble.
Written through the exchange of floppy disks and daily phone calls, it’s a marvellously benign, ridiculously inventive and gloriously funny end-times fantasia featuring angels, devils, 17th-century prophets, witches and witchfinders, and the four horsemen of the apocalypse in modern guise. It’s where I’d put Terry Pratchett if he hadn’t been permanently shared with my book-stealing little sister, and Stephen King if reading The Tommyknockers hadn’t put me off him for 20 years.Īnd it’s where I found and had to pick up again Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s collaborative novel Good Omens, published in 1990, when Gaiman was known for Sandman rather than American Gods and when you could still count all the Discworld books on the fingers of two hands. The ones not written for children but that I first devoured when I was young: Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, Virago classics like Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Antonia White’s Frost in May, Stevie Smith and ee cummings, all of Douglas Adams. It’s just large enough to stack up several of the wine boxes that were a student solution to bookshelves and will doubtless accompany us into our dotage, packed with books waiting to be shared with our daughters over the next few years. We’ve recently moved house and acquired, for the first time, an attic landing.
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