In which my intellect continues to saunter vaguely downwards

[bloodygranuaile]

After reading a couple of light fun fantasies that I hadn't read before, in the days leading up to the end of my No More Goddamn Politics Books pledge I decided to get even intellectually lazier and went, fuck it, I'm rereading Good Omens. I haven't reread a book properly in years and I've watched the miniseries like four times and bought a Best of Queen album, I'm just going to commit to being completely Good Omens-addled for the time being and do the thing.

 

It was a good decision. Good Omens the book is just as delightful as the series and just as delightful as I remember it being. Although in some places it is still definitely a bit '90s, mostly involving technology that I've forgotten existed (I have no sense of how fancy a tape player a Blaupunkt was, only that if Crowley has one it was probably the expensive kind), for the most part the contrast between modern life and Biblical myth is still hilarious, illustrating how our ideas about good, evil, and normal have changed. It's extremely British humor, very dry and with a lot of register-switching and completely harebrained secondary characters. 

 

While I think a lot of people from a variety of religious backgrounds have enjoyed Good Omens over the years, given that Christian mythology is pretty influential in Western culture (understatement of the year, yes, I know), there is a very specific sort of joy that one can take in Good Omens if one is what I call a "recovering Catholic," in which it's just really, really satisfying in a pleasurably guilty way to see the whole faith and its elaborate magical worldbuilding irreverently parodied like any other fantasy system. (You'll be unsurprised to hear that I also think Monty Python's Life of Brian is screamingly funny, and only more so as I get older and deeper into the world of low-budget activism.) 

 

Book Crowley and Book Aziraphale are both less dysfunctional and less close than they are on screen, which actually works perfectly fine here; they spend a little less page time together but they still get really good jokes and have more than enough to do (or to fail at doing). Crowley is less irritable and Aziraphale is less anxious, although this is certainly not to say that Crowley is not irritable and Aziraphale is not anxious, just that the TV show turned them both up to 11 once it got a couple of really good comic actors and some spiffy costumes involved. Their relationship is also not nearly as intense; they are still clearly the only two people in the universe on each other's wavelength due to the circumstances, but there's a lot less crying and angry public breaking up. I'm not sure one version is really better than the other; the more emotionally intense one works brilliantly for TV but the book version works just fine in the book. 

 

There are a couple of really hilarious things in the book that I'd forgotten about that got cut from the TV adaptation, presumably for some combination of time, pacing, and not having to cast literally every single actor in the entire industry at one point or another. The best missing bit is obviously the biker gang that appoints itself the four backup horsemen of the apocalypse, which I would have dearly loved to see onscreen, but you can't have everything. 

 

I also must admit that I love this story as much as I do because I relate to both the main characters even though they're very different and neither of them are actually human. But I relate to Aziraphale's love of books and food and his brand of low-key fussiness, and I also relate to Crowley's self-conscious attempts at being cool and... actually, mostly just to the self-conscious attempts at being cool. Also the general irritability, I suppose. Anyway, they're both great, way better than humans as far as fictional role models go, and I am going to continue mainlining this story in whatever format until I turn into both of them.