The doctrine behind 'Good Omens'

The thing about "Good Omens" is, it's just as fresh and original the third or fourth time through as it is the first time.

Bar none, this is the finest novelization of the Apocalypse that has ever been written. Leave "Left Behind" under the short leg of your table, where it's actually useful; and never mind the attempts of other authors to cash in on Antichrist fever. If the End of Days doesn't happen the way authors Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett describe it, there needs to be a do-over.

The bulk of the action takes place in what is supposed to be the last week of history as the armies of heaven and hell amass for the epic conclusion of their war, at the culmination of human history. There's only one little problem. The forces of hell accidentally misplaced the Antichrist shortly after he was born, and no one's really sure where to find him.

As the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse ride their motorcycles toward Tadfield, England, a demon and an angel who have been living on earth for so long that they can't bear to see it destroyed, join together in a desperate effort to find him and avert Armageddon.

Not surprisingly, the book is full of oblique references to "The Omen." For instance, the infant Antichrist was meant to be switched with the infant son of an American diplomat, as in the movies. The satanist nun involved in the switch suggests "Damien" as a name for the baby, as he was named in the movies. And so on.

Originally published in 1990, "Good Omens" was ahead of the curve for the millennial craze that eventually spawned "Left Behind," so "The Omen" at the time was the most recognizable story to feature the Antichrist.

The fast pacing and British humor that Pratchett and Gaiman bring to the book are reason enough to return to this book again and again; but these two are intelligent writers, and there's enough meat in the book to draw me back long after the jokes will have worn out. (If that ever happens, which seems unlikely.)

There's an interesting humanism at work within "Good Omens" that expresses itself through the framework of Armageddon. Since Adam was raised not at the center of power, as the son of a powerful American diplomat, but as the son of nobody important in Tadfield, England, he's grown up free of the influence of both heaven and hell. He's just pure boy, loving the things a boy loves, doing the things a boy does, and seeing a resolution to the War in Heaven that neither heaven or nor hell apparently anticipates.

The book also repeatedly underscores the role and nature of humanity itself, as the unconsidered third party in this war. The angel Aziraphale and his demonic colleague Crowley, regularly are surprised by a capacity for goodness in humanity that astounds Aziraphale, and a capacity for evil that shocks Crowley. Crowley, we discover, took credit for the Spanish Inquisition even though he had nothing to do with it; and Aziraphale blows up the radar guns of police, because he always assumed that hell's side had come up with them.

In a sense, the humanist themes of "Good Omens" are a rejection of popular Christian eschatology, which often juxtaposes harmonious depictions of Christians leaping straight from earth to heaven via the Rapture, with horrific descriptions of the Great Tribulation, in which God pours out of his wrath upon the earth, and a third of all living things perish, a third of the grass burns up, and a third of the stars are darkened, and so on.

The existence of God himself isn't called into question in the book, ironically enough, although that admittedly would be hard to do when you have angels, demons and the Antichrist himself running around as major characters. God instead is treated fairly respectfully; the questions about his ineffable purpose, such as "Why put a tree right in the middle of a garden and say 'Don't eat from it' instead of planting it somewhere remote and inaccessible if it's such a bad idea?", are hardly new questions, and have in fact bedeviled Christian and Jewish thinkers and philosophers alike for thousands of years.

Crowley and Aziraphale wrestle with these questions themselves after Armageddon passes with the world unexpectedly still intact. Crowley ultimately rejects the notion of history as a cosmic chess game between God and Satan; and, given God's omnipotence and omniscience, decides that it is, instead, more like a very complicated game of solitaire.

Like any good piece of fiction would do, "Good Omens" ends there, leaving readers to sort out for themselves such questions, as well as the general morality of evicting humanity from Paradise over a piece of fruit.

As I once wrote about "It's a Good Life," the Twilight Zone episode where 6-year-old Anthony Fremont sends anyone who displeases him to "the cornfield," stories like this serve an important function for Christians and for the church, if we will let them.

Far from being attacks, they usually are thoughtful critiques of the message that Christians present as coming from God. Sometimes they point out ways that we have bowlderized or just avoided difficult or painful truths; other times, and I think "Good Omens" falls into this category, the stories can and should shore us up, and draw our attention to faults we never admit to ourselves or one another but that are painfully obvious to anyone who has listened to us for five minutes.

(In this case, I'd have to say it's the self-righteousness that glories in the suffering of non-Christians, combined with the narcissism of the prosperity groups that most push the Rapture. Gaiman and Pratchett serve this up in the midst of the Apocalypse with a scene involving an American televangelist who embodies both those traits.)

When you get down to it, "Good Omens" really isn't primarily meant to be a depiction of the Last Days or of biblical prophecy, any more than the book of Revelation is. It's a rollicking good tale, with several themes beyond those I just outlined. The book of Revelation, while it does contain prophecy, is primarily a book about the majesty and glory of God, and the promise that however bad things are, we can be assured that Good will prevail.

And isn't that a more meaningful story than the one they like to tell in church about the Antichrist?



Copyright © 2017 by David Learn. Used with permission.


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'the last temptation'

I never cared much for Alice Cooper, not even when he appeared on "The Muppet Show."

My younger brother liked him enough that he actually went out and bought the album "Alice Cooper Goes to Hell" after seeing the episode -- to this day I'm amazed that our mother consented to let him buy it, let alone listen to it -- but I never really "got" him. Over the years, I've read a few articles and interviews with Cooper that have piqued my interest a little, but never enough actually to listen to anything he's recorded.

Neil Gaiman, on the other hand, I can't get enough of.

So it was Saturday afternoon that I got my first exposure to Alice Cooper in more than 25 years when I saw a Dark Horse Comics trade paperback at the library. The title was "The Last Temptation," and as it turns out, the comic is based on a concept album that Alice Cooper did several years ago with Neil Gaiman. (I kid you not.)

The plot's pretty straightforward, really. A young boy named Steven is at that most awkward age, when he is neither a boy nor even properly speaking a teen. He's too old for childhood activities like trick-or-treating; and he's just at that age where he's starting to notice a je-nais-c'est-quoi about girls that he finds enticing, almost titillating.

Steven feels trapped and unsure of what comes next, when a mysterious showman appears. Amid a theater of horrors the showman offers him the opportunity to become a rock star in exchange for his future.

Standard Faustian stuff, really. The chief difference is that the Steven's good angel is watching out for him, and Steven discovers the dark truth about the showman and his history. He not only escapes the theater of the damned, he also destroys all that the showman has accomplished over the years.

Not a great comic, to be honest. It was worth borrowing from the library and reading once, I suppose, but I returned it Tuesday afternoon with a ton of other books. The best part was Gaiman's foreword. It was creepy and crack-up-out-loud funny at turns, but that alone isn't worth the price of buying a graphic novel.

Maybe I should get a copy for my younger brother. He always did seem to like that Alice Cooper album when we were little.

neil gaiman

Interesting thought about the writing of Neil Gaiman: He writes about what happens on the other side of barriers.

Gaiman is a postmodern writer, who delights in showing the other side of belief, of reality, and holding it up as a mirror to the reality we all know and experience. I suppose that for him the best trigger for a story is to see a border or a barrier, and to wonder what lies beyond it.

In “Neverwhere,” the barrier that was crossed was a social one, where Richard Mayhew notices a badly injured and he assumes lowerclass woman and crosses the line of socially accepted behavior. He takes her back to his apartment, sees that she gets the care she needs, and he ends up becoming trapped in London Below, an entire society of the dispossessed with its own rules and its own reality. In London Below, the names of London Above, from Blackfriars to the Angel Islington, take on an entirely new level of meaning and significance; i.e., there really are black friars and there really is an angel named Islington.

In the book “Coraline,” the girl of the title lives in a home where a locked door once led to an adjoining apartment. She wonders what lies beyond the locked door, and one night discovers that it is open and walks through it, into a dark parody of her own home, where an evil Other Mother waits like a spider to ensnare Coraline in her web, and where her only ally is a cat.

And now the movie “Stardust” has just come out. In this case, though full disclosure requires that I admit I have neither seen the movie nor read the book, the action begins in a town called Wall, where a young man sees a star fall beyond the wall from which the town takes its name and promises to bring it back to the woman he is courting. Once he crosses that wall, the standard rules of reality that he has lived under no longer apply.

'the sandman'

 Read it, loved it, and I quit too. FIrst thing I remember consciously agreeing with the Morningstar on.

I've had a few friends and colleagues with similar disdain for comic books, but I keep winning them over. I regularly buy my wife the "Strangers in Paradise" trades because she can't get enough of them,and a friend of mine from WCN Newspapers is now well and truly hooked on Sandman. I just lent him "Fables and Recollections" and "The Kindly Ones" to get him on the home stretch. Working at WCN, Brian doesn't have the money to buy them, but he loves a good horror story and figures he probably will buy them later on.

And of course, he was hooked enough that I was able to get him to read "V for Vendetta" and since has started looking up other comics on his own. So I claim him as another convert to appreciating comic books as a latter 20th-century art form.


"A Doll's House," since it's set at a "cereal convention," does suggest some fairly graphic stuff, although most of it is left to the reader's imagination (thereby making it worse). Still, it's important because of what happens with Rose Walker toward the end of the collection; it introduces the majorly significant Lyta Hall and her son, Daniel; it relates the story of Dream's relationship with Nada; it introduces Hob and sets up Shakespeare's indentureship under Dream; and also contains the first appearance of the Corinthian, Fiddler's Green and Matthew. Each of those ends up playing a vital role in later stories.

The dead return in "Seasons of Mist," which includes the story of Edwin Paine and how he continues his education. (At least I think that's his name -- my copy is on loan to another friend.) That volume had some disquieting parts, but nothing that gave me nightmares. Mostly I got a kick out of the idea of Morningstar quitting as the Adversary, and I loved the irony of Duma and Remiel being told by the Voice to take office at hell -- especially when Remiel complained it was unjust and how he would rebel, and then realized there was nowhere else for him to go but into hell if he chose to reject the Presence.

The collections generally stand well independently. They're self-contained and give you enough information to figure out what's going on -- something made necessary by the medium, since "Sandman" originally was published over something like a seven-year period in monthly 30-page installments. I can understand a reluctance to read it -- one of the stories in "The Kindly One" actually gave me nightmares -- but the English degree-holding part of me still has to underscore the significance of the volume for the overall series.

Because it is a single cohesive work, and not merely episodic like many superhero titles, it has a certain cadence that reaches a tremendous climax in "The Kindly Ones" before tapering off into the denoument of "The Wake." Without question, it's the finest comic to come out a mainstream publisher in ages. (It's also deservedly recognized as resurrecting horror comics and breathing new life into the comics medium as a whole.)

From what I heard, Gaiman kept expecting to get canceled each issue because of the content.

I've also discovered a certain odd thrill in discovering the depths of literature and comics that Gaiman plumbed for Sandman. Cain and Abel once were the hosts of two of D.C.'s other, long-canceled horror comics, called "House of Mysteries" and "House of Secrets" respectively. I even owned a copy of an issue of the former, at one point. No idea what's happened to it since then. Prez appeared in a miserably conceived comic about 30 years ago.