Kay's Bookshelf

My absolute favorite characters of them all had to be Crawley and Aziraphale. Both were anything but boring, anything but one-sided (Crawley was definitely not completely bad, Aziraphale had some mischievous sparkles in him too) — I loved that enormously, the fact that they were nothing like what one might expect from a demon, respectively an angel. Agnes Nutter (though dead for about three centuries at the time the story takes place) is a delicious character too (well she did talk really funny — understandably but at times hard to understand), having sort of a twisted sense of humor that I really enjoyed :P

Being a Pratchett fan I must say that the scene with the four Hell’s Angers is sort of recycled from one of his own books (a favorite of mine too, called Thief of Time) — unfortunately I don’t remember that one very well but it was sort of a lot funnier there (or perhaps the idea was new to me :P ), especially with none of them but Death being in the mood for Apocalypse and having to be repeatedly required to come and ride because the Apocalypse has come and it was written they should ride… also one of them, War, had gotten married in between and his wife kept mothering him and insisting he should take care not to catch a cold and such :) :) The part related to the four riders in Good Omens is a bit blander, as the four (well, the three, Death is as delicious as ever though he doesn’t talk very much) don’t have much of a personality, they just do their own thing (provoking wars, making people die of starvation, polluting everything in sight) and are just like “well, okay, at last” when they find out the Apocalypse’s coming.

It’s probably worth noting that Pratchett & Gaiman share the idea (that I also tend to share at times) that man is the most evil of any creature anywhere, managing to think of things (evil things of course) that put even the Devil himself to shame (for example see Crowley’s reaction to the Spanish Inquisition: “He’d gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.“). While the idea is not original, it is sort of interestingly presented:

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he’d felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there’s nothing we can do to them that they don’t do themselves and they do things we’ve never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They’ve got what we lack. They’ve got imagination. And electricity, of course.
One of them had written it, hadn’t he … “Hell is empty, and all the devils are here.”
[...]
And just when you’ d think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.

What I liked most: The way Famine made a living (so to say, I know he was immortal) before the Apocalypse: writing books that told (young) women how to starve themselves in order to look good. And it worked like a charm. A bit ironic, you know: hundreds of years ago there were people who had nothing to eat so they had no choice but starve; as nowadays that’s no longer an issue (in some parts of the world of course), Famine had to change his approach and make people want to starve themselves to death — and he did. (he also had restaurants that sold food with absolutely no nutritional value but by far my favorite strategy was the first one)

I was also really amused by the two versions of covers available for the book: one (white) listing Neil Gaiman first (“Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett”), the other (black) listing Terry Pratchett first (“Terry Pratchett & Neil Gaiman”) :P :P

PS The hound from hell (turned Dog) was a really nice touch too :P

What I liked least: Well not actually something I didn’t like but I did not understand what was up with the sword, scales, and crown that War, Famine, respectively Pollution had. Okay, the sword had been Aziraphale’s flaming sword that he had given to Adam and Eve when they were banished from the Garden of Eden, and the scales of Famine must have something to do with weight, measuring weight, losing weight, stuff like that. But… um… what’s up with the Crown? How did Aziraphale’s sword ended up War’s?

Recommend it? Yes, definitely, especially if you are (like me) a Terry Pratchett or Neil Gaiman fan :)
(it’s sort of amusing how many people complain on the dedicated Amazon customers review board that they have lent this book to a friend and never got it back so they had to buy a new one to re-read it :) )

Also written by Neil Gaiman:
American Gods
The Graveyard Book
Coraline
Neverwhere
Snow, Glass, Apples
Stardust

Also written by Terry Pratchett:
Nation
Small Gods

Amazon Affiliate. If you click an Amazon link and buy something, I receive a small percentage of the purchase price.

Popularity: 10% [?]