The Writing of Good Omens

          When Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman wrote the fantasy novel Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch, only Terry was well-known as a writer. By then he had written the first dozen of his humorous fantasy series set in a distant world that mimics our own called the Discworld. Neil was known only as an ex-journalist and burgeoning graphic novelist; he had just written Preludes and Nocturnes, the first in his Sandman series (Wands), which is now famous. Since then Contemporary Authors Online has commented that his “works transcend the genres in which they are written and explore deeper issues than those usually addressed in these works” (CAO). Good Omens is where the two authorial styles meet. It is a satire about the apocalypse, religion, books, movies, and just about anything else Neil and Terry could get their hands on. It begins when a cult of satanic nuns misplace the antichrist somewhere in England; they were supposed to switch him with the newborn son of the American Cultural Attaché, but instead switched him with the son of a cost accountant from Tadfield. Adam, the appropriately named antichrist, is raised human in an idyllic English countryside setting and in a brilliant farcical turn, the son of the American Cultural Attaché, Warlock, spends his childhood being tempted in turn by Nanny Ashtoreth and Brother Francis the gardener (Gaiman and Pratchett, Good Omens 76). When the time for the apocalypse comes around everyone is puzzled when Warlock doesn’t come into his powers, whereas somewhere in Tadfield some strange things are beginning to happen. It is the job of Aziraphale the angel and Crowley the demon to locate Adam and bring about the end of the world. The problem is, they’ve been on earth since the Fall  and have quite gotten to like the place. The current underlying the entire tale is one that flows through all of Neil and Terry’s works and it is best summed up by them, “most of the great triumphs and tragedies of history are caused, not by people being fundamentally good or fundamentally bad, but by people being fundamentally people” (39).
          When Good Omens was first published in 1990 it was panned in The New York Times as “undergraduate dreck [full of] recycled science-fiction clichés” (Queenan). The year after that it was nominated for both the Locus Award for Best Fantasy Novel and the World Fantasy Award. It has since become a “longtime cult favourite” (“EosCon”) and remains on the top of many reading lists. In 2007, it made the Young Adult Library Services Association’s Popular Paperbacks for Young Adults list; the by-line used was “Someone lost the Antichrist” (YALSA). A new edition was released with an introduction by the authors in 2006 and in 2003 it was named number 68 on The BBC Big Read’s Top 100 best-loved books (BBC). Currently, there are 9, 258 fans of the book and 384 reviews on the social book-networking website Shelfari (“Good Omens: Readers & Reviews”). The point is, no matter how many years since Good Omens has been published, it still remains popular. Terry and Neil are asked constantly if they knew they were writing a cult classic. Their response is to debate whether cult classic means that there are people who have copies that have been re-read, dropped in baths, puddles, and soup, and repaired with duct tape, putty, and string or if it means that it’s “sold millions and millions of copies around the world” (Gaiman and Pratchett, “The Facts” 405). They seem quite pleased with both outcomes, and when people are tattooing your still-wet signature onto their forearm (Gaiman and Pratchett, “Foreword” 11) then who cares about bad reviews?
          In the New York Times review,  Joe Queenan, the reviewer, complains that the “whole Supernatural in Your Own Backyard shtick was pretty well milked dry years ago by everyone from Woody Allen (''Mr. Big'') to Monty Python (''Life of Brian'')”, calls the popular musical group Queen  “a vaudevillian rock group whose hits are buried far in the past and should have been buried sooner”, and says that “The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy” was a “vastly overpraised book” (Queenan). It would be easy to say that Queenan doesn’t ‘get’ British humour, but he is, in fact, the author of a book called Queenan Country: A Reluctant Anglophile’s Pilgrimage to the Mother Country, is famous as a satirist, married to a British woman, and has fans raving about his sense of humour (Joe Queenan, “Interview”). This just shows that there are vastly different senses of humour and you can’t explain it away as a cultural difference. Besides which, the flood of accolades from the U.S. illustrates how popular Good Omens is in North America as it is in Britain and that if there are differences between a British sense of humour and an American sense of humour (an Anglo-American humour divide as it were), Queenan is the lone victim.
          Good Omen’s popularity in the U.S. may also have been helped along by crafty publishers. The novel was published in a separate U.S. edition with a number of small changes. Neil jokes that in Britain the authors names are published the wrong way around (Terry is listed first) and Terry jokes that the opposite occurs in U.S. editions (Neil is listed first) (“Pratchett & Gaiman: The Double Act”); this is of course a reference to the relative popularity of each author in either country. The authors often refer to differences they had to make in this edition. They jokingly refer to the second draft of the novel, which took six months, as taking so long, in part, because they had to explain the jokes to the American publishers (Gaiman and Pratchett, “The Facts” 403). A perfect example of one of the changes made to the U.S. edition that also shows how well the book was received in the States is the 700 word addition regarding what happens to the American boy who was mistaken as the antichrist, which was added in because the U.S. audience wanted to know (“Good Omens: Annotations”).
          There are numerous sources for how Good Omens was written, many of them repeat the same stories, but it’s clearly a topic of great interest to fans and journalists alike. When the new edition was published in 2006 it contained extra content about the writing of the novel, which repeatedly emphasizes the same point; the book was written by two friends for fun. They raced each other to the good bits (“Double Act”) and were pleasantly surprised when they made lots of money (Pratchett, “On Neil” 413). The initial idea began with Neil, who had an idea for the first half of a story, wrote several thousand words (“Double Act”), and sent it to his friend Terry. Neil had met Terry in 1985 while interviewing him about his first ever Discworld novel and they had quickly became friends, mostly due to a shared sense of humour and a shared love of the same obscure books (Gaiman, “On Terry” 409); something they like to call their “communal undermind” (“Double Act”). About a year after Terry had received the short story idea he phoned Neil and said that he didn’t know how the story ended, but he did know what happened next. It was originally called “William the Antichrist”, a parody on the William Brown series of books by Richmal Crompton, but quickly became a parody of just about anything they could get their hands on. Neil sums up the book as “a funny novel about the end of the world and how we’re all going to die” (Gaiman, “On Terry” 409). One of the only real problems happened early on; Neil lost the manuscript on disk, so Terry re-typed it using a hard copy that he had and changed aspects as he went (Locus). This is part of the reason why they are never sure who wrote what or how much. The other issue that they mention is one common to all humorous books; not to overdo the gags and to remind yourself that even if you’re sick of the jokes, the reader will be coming to them new (“Double Act”).
          They were both living in England when they wrote the novel (Neil now lives in the States), but communicated solely through telephone and floppy disks mailed through the post (Gaiman, “Several days”). There was a brief attempt at communicating through the internet using 300/75 baud modems, but this process was described as “slightly less efficient than yodelling underwater”(Gaiman and Pratchett, “The Facts” 404).  Overall, it took two months to write, with Neil writing at night  and Terry in the morning, which means that “there was always someone, somewhere writing the novel” (“Double Act”). They re-wrote and footnoted each other’s sections and by the end of the second draft were running into parts where they couldn’t remember who had written what (Gaiman and Pratchett, “The Facts” 404-5) . When asked to guess though, they estimate that Terry wrote anything to do with Adam Young and his gang and Agnes Nutter and Neil wrote the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse and anything with maggots in it (404). When it came down to themes they took responsibility for separate ones and wove them into the storyline (“Double Act”).
          When Good Omens was published and went on to become such a well-loved and popular novel, no one was more surprised than the authors. They constantly stress how fun it was to write, how they raced each other to the juiciest bits, and how much they love autographing copies of the book that have been beaten beyond recognition. There are people who don’t find it funny, including some notable reviewers, but there are quite a few who re-read it, lend it to friends, and rave about it.