Key themes
- The apocalypse as bureaucratic inconvenience
- Angel and demon as the world's odd couple
- Humanity as something better than either heaven or hell expected
About this book
An angel and a demon team up to stop the apocalypse because they rather like the world; co-written with Terry Pratchett and very funny.
Published in 1990, Good Omens was co-written by Pratchett and Gaiman. They described the collaboration as unusually smooth — each finished the other's sentences. It has been continuously in print for over thirty years.
Discussion questions
- Aziraphale and Crowley have been on Earth so long they've gone slightly native — they like it here. What is Gaiman and Pratchett saying through this attachment — about the value of ordinary human life?
- The novel treats heaven and hell as mirror-image bureaucracies, equally inept and equally certain they're right. What is this symmetry satirising?
- Adam Young, the Antichrist raised in a normal English village, turns out to love the world too much to destroy it. What is the novel saying about nature versus nurture — about whether evil is innate?
- The ineffable plan keeps malfunctioning because its authors didn't account for the messiness of human free will. What is the theological argument here?
- Good Omens has been adapted for television. What does the novel do that the adaptation cannot — and vice versa?
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