We’re back, and you’re about to join the Witchfinder Army! We’re here again with Good Omens.
Summary
Aziraphale insists to Crowley that the area they’re driving through feels cherished, though Crowley doesn’t sense a thing. They get to Tadfield Manor, and are promptly shot because the place is no longer a satanic nunnery—Sister Mary Loquacious is now Mary Hudges, and she stayed behind following the fire, read some books, got the place spruced up, and turned it into a center where businesses could hold “management training” of the sort where employees get to shoot paintballs at their coworkers. The angel and demon head into the Manor, when suddenly the shots ringing out in the training exercise are coming from real guns: It’s Crowley’s doing, and chaos breaks out. Aziraphale is mortified, but the demon promises no one will actually be hurt. They find Mary Hodges and Crowley puts her into a sort of trance, asking after the Antichrist. Unfortunately, she has no idea where he is, and all the records were destroyed in the fire. Also the police have arrived at the Manor due to all the shooting, so Crowley and Aziraphale leave. On the way back to London, they discuss getting some humans to search for the Antichrist since they can’t sense him, and agree to contact their “people” separately.
Buy the Book
Defekt
As the Bentley pulls up to the bookshop, Aziraphale notices a book in the backseat, realizing that Anathema left it behind. Then he reads the title, drops his keys several times, and rushes inside with the tome. He makes some cocoa, puts on rubber gloves, and begins reading. Far away on an island, war correspondent Carmine Zuigiber is taking a vacation, and war has broken out around her. As the fighting escalates, an International Express delivery man shows up and brings her a package. She signs for it (using a much shorter name), opens the package to reveal a sword, and seems elated that it has “finally” arrived.
It’s Thursday and the Them are talking about the witch (Anathema) that has moved into Jasmine Cottage. The Them are Adam Young and his gang of friends, Pepper, Wensleydale, and Brian. They get into an argument over whether there are lots of witches about, and spout (largely incorrect) understandings of witch history and the Spanish Inquisition. Adam decides they could do the Inquisition over. They come back after lunch with various “Spanish” items, and begin their first round of “torture” on Pepper’s little sister. Later, Adam wanders by Jasmine Cottage, hears Anathema crying, and inquires about what’s troubling her. She tells him about the book she’s lost, though he’s disappointed by its lack of robots and spaceships. She invites him in for lemonade, to which he asks if she’s a witch, but she explains that she’s an occultist, and he’s fine with that. Dog doesn’t want to go into the cottage due to the horseshoe over the door, but Adam insists, and more Hell burns out of the hellhound. Anathema tells Adam about her various and varied beliefs, many of which contain words and concepts that Adam has rarely heard uttered, so he’s spellbound. She talks about rainforests and recyclables and nuclear power plants, and much more. Anathema finally realizes what is off about the boy—he has no aura. She figures she’s just tired and loans him some copies of her magazines. That night, Adam reads through a bunch of them, and thinks that he would like to do something that could make Anathema happy… so he falls asleep and a nuclear reactor disappears from a nuclear power plant.
It’s Friday and Raven Sable is checking on his conglomerate that sells foodless food to the masses. The delivery man pops up again, this time with a package containing a set of brass scales; Sable has his chauffeur book him a ticket for England. Adam wakes up and tells his friends about all the things he’s discovered in the magazines, bursting with brand new ideas (mainly about Atlantis). That morning, Anathema notes that the ley-lines around her are shifting, spiraling inward toward Lower Tadfield, and she hears a report on the radio about a nuclear reactor going missing. Several thousand miles away, the captain of a pleasure cruiser stumbles upon the lost continent of Atlantis. Adam brings up the Hollow Earth theory next, which doesn’t go over well, but he insists that it’s true, and that Tibetans are living in tunnels under the earth because they’re the teachers who escaped Atlantis’ sinking. Aziraphale has a thought after reading all of Agnes’ prophecies and asks the phone operator for the number of the Youngs in Lower Tadfield—their last digits are 666.
A few weeks back, Newton Pulsifer sees an ad in the paper for a job listing “to combat the forces of darkness” and talks on the phone with Witchfinder Sergeant Shadwell, who asks after his number of nipples and tells him to bring his own scissors. Newt subsequently becomes a private in the Witchfinder Army under Shadwell—a racist, paranoid old codger who lives next to Madame Tracy, a middle-aged woman who gets by doing seances and sex work. The scissors are for cutting out clippings from newspapers that include evidence of witches or unexplained phenomena that might lead to them. Newt tries to point out the nuclear reactor business and Atlantis returning, but Shadwell isn’t interested. Aziraphale calls and requests Shadwell (who is his “people” he’d mentioned to Crowley) send someone to Tadfield to investigate. Tadfield happens to be one of the places Newt noted as sporting strange phenomena (perfect weather for the time of year, every year). Shortly after Newt leaves to check it out, Crowley also calls Shadwell to request the same thing Aziraphale did.
Commentary
(Sorry, didn’t realize that I had us ending this week a page before the “Saturday” section started, so I just read through to there, whoops.)
We get two sections in succession with very prominent gun usage, being Warlock’s birthday party and the training at Tadfield Manor. And, interestingly, the only way these things make their way into the narrative is through American influence. Warlock’s parents are American diplomats, and of course, these are the people who would think armed guards at a child’s birthday party were warranted. (Do they think the American Cultural Attaché is going to be assassinated at their private residence during his kid’s birthday party, I mean, really, how much security to these people actually need.) And yes, Crowley is responsible for giving everyone real guns at the Manor, but it comes at the behest of one participant who is fancying himself a sort of Clint Eastwood for the purpose of the exercise. It really makes you think about how much American culture is bound up in guns, even in the most general terms. And then there’s the fact that the guns at Warlock’s birthday were omitted in the television series because this book was written pre-Columbine, pre-Sandy Hook, and pre-Parkland, so showing that would have created an entirely different tone.
The transformation sequence that explains how Mary Loquacious became Mary Hodges is good for a laugh, but also very much a product of its time. The ‘80s and ‘90s were obsessed with narratives about women learning business and gaining power, and questioning whether or not those lives made them happy. (Often they didn’t, unless you’re watching Working Girl.) Thankfully, there’s no nonsense in here about Mary Hodges thinking her life is empty now that she’s a small business owner with an eye toward making Tadfield Manor a destination spot for corporate retreats. She just gamely trades one sort of life for another, and finds that it suits her quite well.
Here’s a thing I never really thought hard about: If Crowley hadn’t changed all the paintball guns to real ones, they would have had more time to question Mary, and they might have gotten somewhere. (Okay, they probably wouldn’t have, but it’s a possibility.) He kinda screws them over by being his own demonic self. Aziraphale would smugly say something about evil containing the seeds of its own destruction—which is exactly what he says in this section—but to that point, pretty much everything Crowley does falls far more under the category of “mischief” than “evil.” By that same token, you could argue that most of what Aziraphale does falls under “maintaining the status quo” more than “good.” Which is the whole conceit, yes, but moreover, it makes them both more interesting characters.
Again with my fascination around how time changes the way things in this book come off. The whole background of Pepper’s mother joining a commune and giving her kid that name—it was a thing in the 70s. The Lord of the Rings was a counterculture staple, and there were lots of young hippies (and folks a little too young to be hippies, but still falling into that general group) who named their kids like that. But these days you read the name Pippin Galadriel Moonchild and just think “oh, Pepper’s mom was a nerd.” The recent series kept her mother’s backstory, which leaves me with with a load of questions, namely, where are all these communes in the English countryside now. But once you update the narrative to an Apocalypse in 2019, the Them were all born in roughly 2008. So the real point is, Pepper’s mom was extremely into those movies when they came out (and probably fantasy in general), because those dates line up perfect.
The way the Them speak to each other is one of the places where this book feels far too real for its own good. The first time I ever read Good Omens, I was still too young to appreciate that aspect—it was too close to my actual experiences because I was a teenager—but as an adult, it lands differently. The meandering nature of their conversations, the way everyone is so distractible and intent on providing their own expertise, little bits of dialogue where the grammar is off like saying “we should of” and so on. And of course there’s this bit in discussion of their Star Wars-based games: “The Them were, anyway, temperamentally on the side of planet destroyers, provided they could be allowed to rescue the princesses at the same time.” Which, yet again, gives you a very good idea of where the group is headed in this story. They may be a chaotic crew of tween misfits, but they’re keen to save things heroically too.
There’s a clear shift occurring throughout this book with the Them as it pertains to growing up as well. The kids are all eleven, which is a number that generally pops up around chaos and disorder in Christian religious terms, and also in life, as it so happens. Eleven is that age right before being a teenager, where you’re not quite done being a kid yet, but you’re aware that the world is bigger and more complicated than you might have previously guessed. We get it in little asides (like the fact that the boys of the Them are aware that starting a scuffle with Pepper might mean something different now than it did when they were smaller), and in bigger ones, where all the kids note that the world is full of interesting things that adults aren’t telling them. Adam feels this the most keenly, of course, and that leads reality to warp around his wishes.
Throughout this section, Aziraphale busies himself reading the entire book of Agnes’ prophecies. This is where we come to the line which is well-embedded in most fans memories, being that the impression Aziraphale gives is “that he was English, that he was intelligent, and that he was gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide.” This particular quote, and the digressions made from it (being that he is smart, but cannot be English, and that angels are sexless unless they “make an effort”) has been the inspiration for probably… about eighty-three percent of the Good Omens fanfiction out there. Again, people making the assumption that Aziraphale is gay is not, in and of itself, humorous because being gay isn’t funny. But the idea of applying sexuality onto a relatively immortal being who probably understands gender about as well as he understands “bebop” music will always be funny.
We come to the introduction of Shadwell and the Witchfinder Army and Madame Tracy, which is where things start wending their way toward labyrinthine. Shadwell is extremely racist, which is not enjoyable to read, but certainly on par with real people who believe the sorts of things that he believes. And there’s a lot of realism, too, in his relationship with everyone around him, including Newt. The narration tells us that people tend to like Shadwell, even though he’s racist, and sexist, and all-over grouchy and grubby, and that’s because despite being all those things, he largely keeps to himself in such a way that he’s viewed as harmless. With Newt, we get someone who feels a sort of confused affection for the man once he’s spent time around him; he tries to challenge Shadwell’s viewpoints with counter-narratives and gentle corrections to his blatant misinformation. Shadwell, of course, isn’t having any of it… then again, you’re not going to get that sort of man to change his mind by telling him he’s wrong. What Newt is doing is probably the most effective bet for the time being.
But moreover, the point is that both Anathema (a witch) and Shadwell (a witchfinder) are equally bound up in conspiracy theories, right? Conspiracies of different flavors, sure, but conspiracies all the same. We get a lot of that all over this book, in fact, which lends a general absurdity to the proceedings of the Apocalypse. But more importantly, it showcases that humans believe a lot of ridiculous things. Which seems a rather pointed jab in a book that is dramatizing Armageddon for comedic effect. Because we believe a lot of ridiculous things, you see.
Asides and little thoughts:
- Of course, the aside about the third baby getting adopted and winning prizes for his tropical fish turns out to be true, and that boy is Greasy Johnson, the kid who runs the only other gang in town and tries to bully Adam and his friends.
- Anathema’s long list of beliefs include “Americans out of practically everywhere down to and including Long Island.” And look, I got married on the north fork of Long Island and… honestly, I agree.
- Of course, the line cook is supposed to be Elvis, which puts me in mind of Death’s stint as a line cook in Mort. In both cases this seems to be billed as therapeutic, or at least satisfying to each party. Which is amusing to me, because I’ve never met a line cook who was particularly chill about their job.
Pratchettisms/Gaimanisms:
Crowley’s hands itched. Aziraphale healed bicycles and broken bones; he longed to steal a few radios, let down some tires, that sort of thing.
Not that he was actually expecting a sentence like “until eleven years ago the Manor was used as a convent by an order of Satanic nuns who weren’t in fact all that good at it, really,” but you never knew.
The trouble with trying to find a brown-covered book among brown leaves and brown water at the bottom of the ditch of brown earth in the brown, well, grayish light of dawn, was that you couldn’t.
And she held her sword, and she smiled like a knife.
Adam drummed his heels on the edge of the milk crate that was doing the office of a seat, listening to this bickering with the relaxed air of a king listening to the idle chatter of his courtiers.
Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls.
“Huh,” said Pepper, summing up their feelings.
The WA’s headquarters was a fetid room with walls the color of nicotine, which was almost certainly what they were coated with, and a floor the color of cigarette ash, which was most certainly what it was.
Next week we’ll get up to “[…] a crack of thunder so loud it hurt, and a hard rain began to fall.”
“Being gay isn’t funny”, but at the time that the book was written it was at least, a little funny to some. After all, sex is funny. Being attracted to anyone is always a little ridiculous whatever the gender. We humans are inherently ridiculous creatures whatever our gender or orientation may be.
“gayer than a tree full of monkeys on nitrous oxide” also, I think, has a bit of the old meaning of gay. That is, happy in a noisy sort of way.
Well they’re still about, but I think there’s less communes, and more, areas that contain lots of people with unconventional ideas. St Werburghs in Bristol comes to mind. I’m sure there’s some interestingly named kids there.
There’s another line about Shadwell that I find quite useful in the modern political climate:
But this section is just a perfect bit of writing:
Shadwell is sort of a watered-down version of the first Witchfinder-General, Matthew Hopkins, who was a truly vile man.
I like the way Pratchett finds time for people like Newt – all elbows, knees and incompetence, and always trying to do the right thing. He reminds me of Mort.
@@@@@ There was a line in The Illuminatus Trilogy – “gayer than a tree full of parrots” – that I always liked, for the same reasons.
Annotated Pratchett notes on this portion of Good Omens, which might be out of date:
– [p. 58] “‘It’s probably compline, unless that’s a slimming aid.’”
No, compline is indeed one of the periods of the religious day (around 18.00 h, according to [the annotator’s] copy of The Name of the Rose). The slimming aid is ‘complan’.
– [p. 65] “The contingent from Financial Planning were lying flat on their faces in what had once been the haha, although they weren’t very amused.”
If you don’t know what a haha is, see the annotation for p. 58 of Men at Arms .
– [p. 70] “…Bee-elzebub has a devil put aside for me, for me…“
Another line from Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody.
– [p. 73] “The Nice And Accurate Prophecies made the Hitler Diaries look like, well, a bunch of forgeries.”
Stern magazine published a series of Hitler’s diaries in the mid-80s which, in fact, turned out to be forgeries.
– [p. 75] “[…] Elvis was taken by Space Aliens in 1976 because he was too good for this world.”
Actually, Elvis died in 1977, so perhaps these Space Aliens left a doppelgänger? Neil and Terry seem to be using the wrong year deliberately, because later on (p. 177, during the video trivia game scene) there is a reference to both Bing Crosby and Marc Bolan dying in 1976, when in fact they both died in 1977 as well.
– [p. 79] “‘This wouldn’t of happened if we’d of gone to Torremolinos like we usually do,’ […]”
Torremolinos is a resort on the Mediterranean coast of Spain, which in the past was very popular with the more downmarket sort of British holiday-maker. In US terms, imagine Atlantic City/Las Vegas. Take it down market a bit. A bit more. No, a bit more than that. There. That’s beginning to get close to Torremolinos. The town has in recent years made a great effort to change its image and attract a better class of tourist but whether this has worked remains doubtful.
– [p. 80] “[…] the frequent name changes usually being prompted by whatever Adam had happened to have read […]”
The Hole-in-the-Chalk gang refers to Butch Cassidy’s Hole-in-the-Wall Gang, The Really Well-Known Four to The Famous Five, The Legion of Really Super-Heroes to DC Comics’ Legion of Super-Heroes series, The Justice Society of Tadfield to DC’s Justice Society of America.
– [p. 81] “Pepper’s given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild.”
Both Pippin and Galadriel are characters from Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (although Pippin is actually a male hobbit). Terry explains that Pepper’s names are not really a parody of hippie practices:
“It’s an observation. I have signed books for two Galadriels at least — and three Bilboes. Your basic hippy is fairly predictable.”
[AeronaGreenjoy: The only thing I find predictable about other hippies is that being among them makes me happy and living in a place with a paucity of them worsens my depression.]
– [p. 88] “‘I bet ole Torturemada dint have to give up jus’ when he was getting started […]’”
Tomás de Torquemada, Spanish inquisitor-general notorious for his cruelty. He was largely responsible for the expulsion of the Jews from Spain around 1492.
– [p. 95] “Where the reactor should have been was an empty space. You could have had quite a nice game of squash in it.”
For the connection between nuclear reactors and squash courts, see the annotation for p. 138 of Reaper Man .
[The Reaper Man annotation: “This is a reference to the fact that the first nuclear reactor, built by Enrico Fermi, was indeed erected under a squash court. Irrelevant, but interesting, is that for a long time Russian physicists, misled by a poor translation, believed that Fermi’s work was done in a ‘pumpkin field’.”]
– [p. 98] “Sable signed for it, his real name — one word, seven letters. Sounds like examine.”
But, as many alert readers have noticed, the word ‘famine’ only has six letters. Terry says: “Oh, yeah. The famous seven-lettered six letter name. […] It’s like this. In the original MS, it was six letters, because we can both count. And it was six letters in the Gollancz hardcover. And six letters in the Workman US hardcover. And became seven in the Corgi edition. No-one knows why.”.
This problem was fixed in later reprints of Good Omens. [AeronaGreenjoy: emphasis mine.] See also the annotation for p. 11 of Maskerade
– [p. 99] “‘An’ there was this man called Charles Fort,’ he said. ‘He could make it rain fish and frogs and stuff.’”
Charles Fort lived in the first half of this century and made a career out of attacking established scientific convictions and practitioners, mostly by collecting and publishing book after book of scientifically unexplainable occurrences and phenomena such as, indeed, accounts of rains of fish, etc.
Although Fort and his Fortean Society cheerfully collected and proposed vast numbers of crackpot theories, Charles Fort was by no means a crackpot himself. He just wanted to attack and needle the scientific establishment using every possible means at his disposal.
For more information about Fort [the annotator refers] the reader to Martin Gardner’s wonderful book Fads and Fallacies in the Name of Science (1957), or to the Fortean Society’s newspaper The Fortean Times, still being published in both UK and US today.
– [p. 100] “[…] a highly successful film series with lasers, robots and a princess who wore her hair like a pair of stereo headphones™.”
This is of course the Star Wars saga, directed by George Lucas. The princess is Princess Leia Organa; and the person with the coal scuttle helmet who is allowed to blow up planets is Darth Vader.
– [p. 103] “If Cortez, on his peak in Darien, had had slightly damp feet […]”
From On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer by John Keats, where the experience of reading Chapman’s translation of Homer is compared to the feeling Cortez must have had:
(Actually, Keats was mixing up Cortez (who conquered Mexico, and was the first European to look upon Mexico City) with Balboa (who climbed Darien, and was the first European to see the Pacific from the east).
– [p. 104] “[…] eight other people […] two of them […] and one of the other six […]”
Or at least, that’s what it says in [the anotator’s] hardcover version and in the American trade paperback. In the English paperback, however, the quote says “one of the other five” (italics [the annotator’s]), which is of course rather confusing, since two plus five usually equals seven, not eight.
Terry says: “[…] we got the numbers right — I checked the original MS. This is another manifestation of the strange numbers glitch (remember famine, the seven letter word?)”
– [p. 107] “[…] people called Grasshopper, little old men sitting on mountains, other people learning kung-fu in ancient temples […]”
David Carradine’s character Kwai-Chang Caine was given the nickname ‘Grasshopper’ by his mentor, Master Po, in the television series Kung Fu.
Incidentally, the head of the Shaolin monastery where Caine studied was Chen Ming Kan, and the subsidiary monks were the masters Shun, Teh, Yuen, Wong, Sun and, already mentioned, Po.
If you are the kind of person who enjoys learning this type of mindboggling trivia, then run, don’t walk to your bookstore, and buy the Straight Dope books by Cecil Adams. Your life will be vastly enriched. There is even a Pratchett connection as well: Terry uses the Straight Dope books as reference works.
[p. 109] “There is no longer a real Witchfinder General.”
Just for the record: the story as Terry and Neil give it in this section is quite true. Matthew Hopkins existed, caused the hanging of nineteen alleged witches, and was rumoured to have been hanged as a witch himself (although there no evidence of that, and most historians believe he died of tuberculosis). [The annotator is] told Hopkins was portrayed fairly accurately by Vincent Price in the film The Conqueror Worm, a.k.a. Witchfinder General.
– [p. 109] “There is also, now, a Witchfinder Private. His name is Newton Pulsifer.”
The name ‘Lucifer’ means “bringer of light”. One particular meaning of ‘pulse’ is a legume — a pea or lentil. Therefore, ‘Pulsifer’ means “bringer of peace (peas)”.
[The annotator has] no idea if this is truly what Terry and Neil intended, but it is a beautifully convoluted pun, regardless
– [p. 112] “Newt […] blushed crimson as he performed the obligatory nipple-count on page three”.
American readers should be aware that some English tabloid papers traditionally showed a photo of a topless girl on page three, although [the annotator is] told these days only The Sun still follows this practice.
– [p. 113] “‘Women wi’ too many arms.’”
Refers to the Hindu goddess Kali (although quite a few more Hindu gods and goddesses have more than the usual allotment of arms — Shiva comes to mind).
Two lines further down there is a reference to Baron Saturday, who is of course our old friend Baron Samedi (see the annotation for p. 157 of Witches Abroad ).
Holy Carp, Emmet really doesn’t have much to say about the Horsepersons. I feel like I’m in the Wheel of Time fandom, where most people don’t talk about Shadowspawn beyond what’s needed for a read or reread recap and I endlessly complain that nobody shares my priorities.
Assorted non-Horsepersons notes:
The Them are the delights of this book for me, truly the bright doubles of the Horsepersons. They showcase Pratchett’s gift for writing conversations full of idiosyncratic logic, which we’ll enjoy throughout the Discworld books.
I preferred Mary as Sister Mary Loquacious because she was perfection. But whatever makes her happy. Though I’m sure knitting and orgasms are not mutually-exclusive aspects of life, even if they’re not discussed in the same magazines.
Um. Nigel wants to be “Chairman of Industrial Holdings (Holdings) PLC.” But the event is “United Holdings [Holdings] PLC Initiative Combat Course.” And Newt works for “United Holdings (Holdings) PLC.” I’m confuzzled about how those are all connected. And what was the “European outfit” that Frannie was thinking of having Famine buy into? *checks* Oh, it was “Holdings (Holdings) Incorporated.” That might be an entirely separate entity. I don’t know.
“Either Shit or Get Out of the Kitchen.” That mixed metaphor is the inverse of what we’ll get on occasion in Discworld: “If you can’t stand the heat, get off the pot.”
How did sheep “eat” a minibus? I thought they were less extremely-omnivorous than goats.
Hah. I was more obsessed with food’s healthiness as a child than I am now, and rather more so than the Them.
“My father says [nuclear power plants] are dead safe and mean we don’t have to live in a greenhouse.” *puts hand over eyes* That’s not what “greenhouse effect” means.
As a second-generation hippie, I was always miffed by the bit about Pepper’s mother. My hippie mom didn’t give me a cool name like that,* though sharing a name with a Lord of the Rings character would have gotten awkward when I read the books and fell wildly in love with Gollum. Also, descriptions of hippie experiences I haven’t had – I never lived in a tent commune, grew marijuana, or abstained from bra-wearing – always make me doubt my identity and then double down on certainty of it with extra vehemence.
But I was mollified a little later when Anathema was revealed to have a beautifully relatable set of beliefs and an enviable ability to effectively express them. Even when the pivotal plot-importance of this was yet to play out, it was clear that she had influenced Adam more in a day than Brother Francis influenced Warlock in eleven years.
I loved it when the nuclear fuel vanished while the plant kept running — basically the first of this book’s wish-fulfillment fantasies for me. (Anathema’s ‘conversion’ of Adam was actually the first, but wasn’t an impossible fantasy.) Too bad the same thing didn’t happen to all of the world’s nuclear fuel, and nuclear waste, and other toxic waste…
I’m with Wensleydale and Brian on wanting to live in sunken Atlantis. Especially since I subscribe to Herbert Kenney’s assertion that it’s currently inside a ginormous whale named Joe.
“Cities that sank under the sea were right up the Them’s street.” But not literally, at the moment.
Yeah, I’m sure Adam somehow looked “capable of blowing up the world.”
The bit about the kids’ attempted Plague of [singular] Frog reminds me of Pyramids.
“Pirates and bandits and spies and astronauts” do still exist, kid.
“The world was bright and strange, and he was in the middle of it.” D’awww. I love getting that feeling.
I love that (in this story) there’s a maritime code for encountering Atlantis and losing at quoits to its high priest.
“Newt had always suspected that people who used the word ‘community’ used it in a very specific sense that excluded him and everyone he knew.” Ouch. Burn. Even my college’s ecology class, a rigorous regimen of unlearning beliefs, didn’t trash the word community, as it trashed ecosystem, niche, succession, and equilibrium.
Hoo boy, talk about prescience. “Normal weather for this time of year” is getting steadily more abnormal.
@@.-@: Yes indeed. That quote perfectly describes people who hate everyone who demographically differs from them in any way, geographic or otherwise but especially geographic. I’ve read a novel whose only POV character was that type, and it was an uncomfortable experience.
Pratchettisms/Gaimanisms:
Probably [the Satanic nuns] had gone to darkest America to convert the Christians.
Her thoughts slipped away like a duck off water.
“I saw a program. It had David Attenborough, so it’s true.”
Call-forward:
Team-building paintball will feature in The Science of Discworld 2.
*I was more miffed that I didn’t get a nature-themed name like so many children of hippies. My friends now in their parenting years are continuing that tradition, naming some of their own children after plants and animals. One of them currently has an infant son named Raven. I feel odd about that right now.
Horsepersons Lecture 2
(I hope it’s OK to use their true names here before the book starts doing so)
War’s operations remain a bit mysterious, compared to the details we get about Famine and Pollution. As I said last week, she inflames all our destructive emotions and guides them to take it out on each other. But how much of this is due to her beauty, and how much to the ability to make people inexplicably aggressive in her presence? She doesn’t stay in a career for more than three or four hundred years; what did she do before selling arms? She’s said to be “the kind of woman you expect to see as the beautiful consort to the corrupt generalissimo of a collapsing Third World country.” Perhaps that is what she did at some point(s) in history, if it was strategically useful for furthering wars.
Famine continues to innovate, and to get more chilling. When people aren’t stuck with him, he makes them want him. CHOW(TM) and SNACKS(TM) target people who are unwilling to stop eating altogether, as his previously-viewed victims do, but glad to eat — and pay extra for — food that they know doesn’t sustain them. And boy is there ever a market for that. I vividly remember seeing the trademarked slogan for multi-grain Cheerios: “More grains, less YOU!” I thought: Annihilate yourself with breakfast cereal! If that’s not the work of Raven Sable, it’s someone as similar to him as makes no matter. Therein lies the terror. No one is actually going around the world starting wars with their mere presence, or deliberately causing all of the catastrophic pollution events. But the people who shape diet culture and run the diet industry do the same thing as Raven Sable. They (like most of his human underlings, probably) may be in it for the money instead of a biblical mandate to commit mass murder, but the effect is the same.
His MEALS(TM), which are CHOW(TM) with fat and sugar added, are more like real-world “junk food,” which is also marketed quite vigorously but is not always such a chosen food in the “food deserts” where little else is available — something else I expect he has a hand in somehow.
“If you had told him that there were children starving in Africa, he would have been flattered that you’d noticed.” He evidently continues his traditional pursuits as well, or claims credit for their current effects. The Horsepersons excel at multitasking.
So he’s arguably the scariest Horseperson. But when I fight diet culture in my own mind, or food insecurity in my community, I can picture myself kicking him. That’s nice.
“The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.” Yes, very laudable of the French. But he invented nouvelle cuisine in Paris. He’s versatile like that, succeeding one way or another.
His agent’s name is Nick. As in, Old Nick? Har har.
“I’ll be making my own way back.” Back where? To Hell?
The scales are brass when we first see them, but silver when we see them again after…everything happens. Why?
I love the paintball section because it does highlight a part of working life that was all too common until the GFC wiped out frivolous expenses: the “team building exercise”. As someone who, until recently, was pretty low on the pecking order in the workplace (I’m really only a step or two above where I was twenty years ago), I always thought the idea of these sounded like great fun, but GO put the idea into my head that they were only going to be instances of people ganging up on other people but in the context of a game. And, when I ventured into the workplace, this was proved to be right: these sorts of exercises are never undertaken by the people who would benefit the most from them, ie low-paid workers who have no loyalty to the management team simply because they seem so distant from them. It’s always the higher-ups. And nothing ever changed in the workplace, except that management just seemed more closely-knit against whatever might have been a threat to them rather than the actual team. I was surprised when I reread it as a working parent just how much more I got out of it.
Putting in real guns that don’t actually kill anybody is more like mischief than evil in my book; it might even turn out to be good, if somebody learned something. (Not bloody likely, but still….) Kind of paralleling the comments at the beginning about what effect Crawley might have had.
good line:
He wouldn’t have said “That’s weird” if a flock of sheep had cycled past playing violins.
@6 annotations:
* I wonder whether “The Quarry Gang” was supposed to be a sly reference to the original name of the Beatles.
* I hadn’t thought of that meaning of “Pulsifer” — possibly because I’ve known someone of that name for about as long as Good Omens has existed. (He’s a fellow member of a chorus I sing in.) Cute idea, though.
* various sources report that the “page-3 girl” was dropped by the Sun some time ago. (And not beforetime….)
@7: These were Welsh sheep, not wimpy English sheep. (No, I don’t really believe even Welsh sheep could eat a minibus — maybe just a Morris Minor?) wrt “greenhouse”, ISTM that’s another miss by the comprehension of an 11-year-old. wrt naming a kid Raven, this one case is an outlier, or possibly pronounced “raaven” rather than “rayven”; a decade after GO came out I bought a mug with a North-Pacific Native American representation of Raven as I thought he was an excellent guide for a software engineer — there’s at least one thread in which he’s the local Prometheus.
@8: I think you’re incorrectly hard on the diet industry; the point of many of their foods is to provide essential traces along with enough filler to dull the hunger reflex. (This refers to relatively serious diet foods, rather than the craze for fat-free foods that is still playing in the US.) I’d eat multi-grain unsweetened Cheerios if I weren’t getting regular rations of homemade bread; they’re healthier than most foods I don’t have to spend too much time to prepare, “diet” or not.
@10: True. In real life, those foods are often less harmful than the messaging around them. I’ve got no objection to that cereal, but fear the mindset that my goal should quite explicitly be to diminish myself for my own well-being and because the world would be better with less of me in it. Various opposing cultural forces have collectively taught me to be terrified of developing that mindset. And it sells.
It’s a contentious subject that I probably shouldn’t have raised here. I’ve just…been holding onto that particular Horsepersons rant (and some others) for a long time, without much opportunity to vent it.
Re: guns. In Britain, we had the Dunblane massacre. After that, the law on guns was tightened up even further and many schools installed metal detectors/extra security measures, so that mad/bad people could not just wander into a school and kill children.
Re: Hippy commune. Try living in Glastonbury, Somerset! I’ve come across children/people named after Scottish islands, most of the characters from ‘Lord of the Rings’ and Arthurian legend! And that leaves out the ‘Moonchild’ sorts of names….
I think there was a house near where I lived named Rivendell, in the 1970s. In fact, “One Scotland Gazetteer” web site says there are over 100, all over. I suppose it was homely in some sense. It had a garden, and it wasn’t what you’d call a mansion. I don’t think that a dell was riven, either, but I didn’t look round the back. I think in the book of Tolkien’s letters, he said that these are all over the place, and he’s flattered but he also feels that people should ask his consent.
…Nobody annotates the Spanish Inquisition? :-)
@7
Working for a multinational as I do, the idea that different branches have very similar names does not surprise.
First, a question. How did Aziraphale know to ask about “Young”? Crowley didn’t know the name. They didn’t get the name from Hodges. Anathema didn’t know the name. Did I miss something?
Shadwell’s view of people seems to mirror Sgt. Colon’s view (at least when we first met him).
While GO is based on it, I find it amusing that Aziraphale’s collection of inaccurate prophecies includes Revelation and attributes it to John of Patmos’ consumption of psychodelic mushrooms.
Anathema’s ancestors’ comments on Agnes’ prophecies read like other’s comments on Nostradamus.
I much prefer the Discworld horsemen to these. Plus I have always felt that War is written in a far too sexual and sexist manner. They do have some great comic moments, however.
The Them are just, as the Them would say, brilliant.
Beyond the apocalypse, GO is, to my mind, an opportunity for Terry and Neil to riff on the stupidity of the average person. As John Major (PM in the 90s) said: “Only in Britain could it be thought a defect to be ‘too clever by half.’ The probability is that too many people are too stupid by three quarters.”
@19 –
Attributing Revelations to the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms might hearken back to John Allegro’s The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross, which interpreted early Christianity along those lines. Seems like the sort of thing that Gaiman, at least, would have read, although I seem to recall a mention of psychedelic mushrooms in The Light Fantastic, which was up to Pratchett alone.
@18
Something in the prophecies, I would assume. Aziraphale had a lot of notes, so he might have had a hint. Maybe Agnes said something like “The Beast will be Young, and among the Young of Tad’s Field will he be found” :)
Re. the name Pulsifer: I like to think that Newt Pulsifer’s name is a nod to the legendary Lew Pulsipher, leading light of the wargaming and Dungeons & Dragons scene in the ’70s and ’90s and a guru of board game and computer game design right through to the present day. Alas I can’t prove anything, but I can say that Neil Gaiman and Lew Pulsipher were both regular writers for Imagine magazine (a professional magazine dedicated to AD&D) in the 1980s, so Gaiman at least would have been familiar with the name.
@20: Logically, that’s the only thing that makes sense but it doesn’t explain why Anathema, who found Tadfield, didn’t pick up on it. I was wondering if there was a line in the story that I didn’t pick up on.
@21: that makes much more sense and I hereby dub it annotative canon. The other explanations seem to be trying to create an etymology or pun where there was none intended.
@8 (re War’s modus operandi)
I don’t get the impression people are fighting to impress her; after all, in her scene in this section everybody shoots at her. (Although we get indications later that at least 3 of the Horsepeople are Something Else in humanoid guise, just like Crowley; War may have found that gobsmacking beauty gave more chances for violence.) I’d call it part of her Attribute (although not always requiring conscious evocation as in Lord of Light), just as the cafe where they meet runs out of all the food except horrid pizza when Famine shows up and becomes much dirtier when Pollution does.
and @11: yes, the message that the world would be better off with less of a person (rather than with some persons consuming fewer resources) would be … uncalled-for — and even the do-it-for-yourself pressure gets excessive. OTOH, some of us wouldn’t mind there being less of our individual selves; when the choruses I sing in finally get to put on live concerts I’ll probably need new formal trousers — and I’ve put on a fraction of what the news reports many people have in the plague year.
@20: Did Anathema find Tadfield via prophecies or via magic-tech? And has she read and indexed all the prophecies? (Yes, there are a lot of cards — but I learned the hard way how much bulkier index cards can be than the text they reference. Consider (e.g.) how much white space each card has vs how much the book has.)
@22 – We’re told that Aziraphale’s angelic intelligence/knowledge enables him to interpret the Prophecies relatively easily. It’s entirely reasonable that he was able to pick up on things and make connections that the Devices couldn’t.
@23 – Anathema didn’t index the prophecies herself; they have comments on from her ancestors, so they must have been done quite a while ago.
I’d forgotten that — good point. We know that she’s read some of the index cards (she’s able to pull out a particularly embarrassing card later, but ISTM likely that it was one of the ones that had her name on it) but probably not all of them (e.g. she asks someone to pick a random card, certain that it will be helpful, rather than knowing what to go to). Maybe too busy reading all the woo-woo rags she subscribes to?
@23: Anathema found Tadfield through the magic tech of ley lines. Crowley and Aziraphale from the hospital, and, later, the Witchfinder Army from Crowley and Aziraphale (independently). Like Dog, the horsemen were drawn to Adam directly.
@24: That’s the logical conclusion. But it would have been nice and Nice for him to have cited a prophecy linking “Young” and the Antichrist, the apocalypse, Tadfield, something.
@6: That bit of Keats poetry is responsible for the only Bertie Wooster line that has ever made me laugh: “Jeeves, who was that fellow who, upon looking at something, felt like someone looking at something?”
@10: Raven is a fine name, but in my current phase of Horsepersons obsession, it inevitably sticks in my mind.
@12: Here in New York, recently, a young child proudly told me she was named Iona “after an island in Scotland.” So it happens elsewhere. Her parents might also be hippies. Many people in my homerown are; it’s a large reason I live here. But the only person I’ve known who was named after a character in non-religious fiction was an elderly man named Kim who claimed to be named after the Rudyard Kipling character. Wensleydale’s “greenhouse” line is entirely believable, but as an environmental educator, I have to facepalm, just as Mark Oshiro often did when Discworld characters misunderstood something.
@18: Pratchett uses a quip with “too clever by half”/”too stupid by three-quarters” in Wintersmith. I imagine he was inspired by the John Major quote, but I’m not sure, as the Annotated Pratchett Files didn’t cover that book (or any Discworld novel from Going Postal onward.)
@23: War is described as having gorgeous hair “that men would kill for, and indeed often had.” Her first segment concludes: “Farther down the train a fight broke out. Scarlett grinned. People were always fighting, over her, and around her; it was rather sweet, really.” It sounds to me like her presence inflames aggression even when people don’t see her, but peoples’ desire for her seems to be a common source of conflict as well. I like the comparison of her to a forest fire — beautiful and fascinating at a distance, really bad to be near. That description arguaby applies to actual war as well — glamorized and glorified, seeming sensually dangerous, until it’s experienced up close.
Oddly, the humans in that cafe won’t start trying to kill each other when she arrives, though they’ll continue bickering. I expect people do always feel hungry in Famine’s presence, as at the cafe. But I don’t think food always vanishes inexplicably in Famine’s presence, as it didn’t do so in, for example, that nouvelle cuisine restaurant. (Or the Burger Lord, but he might have less effect on “foodless” food.) Pollution’s presence making everything filthy is reasonable, but seems like it would be a problem in the workplaces he forgettably inhabited. I groundlessly hypothesize that their powers might be…acting up at that pivotal point.
@27, re the horsepeople’s powers: I don’t think that’s groundless, and I had the same thought as you. That scene happens after they ride out, and shortly afterwards, we will see how their human guise starts sloughing off. I don’t think it’s unlikely that their powers are becoming stronger and less controllable as the Apocalypse starts.
A fair point re the unveiling of both personae and powers. I’d quibble over the presence of “food” in the nouvelle-cuisine restaurant; as in the cafe, there is still something presented as food — it’s just ~useless. I wouldn’t assume that G&P were being 100% organized/deliberate in this (cf other slips discussed above), but it reads like a nice touch.
Your response on War brings up an interesting contrast: liking for famine, pestilence, or pollution is very marginal, where a liking for war is closer to the median in many societies. So my parallel of Attributes is weak; War has more facets.
The horsemen, Famine, Pollution, and War, seem to exist solely as comic foils for Terry and Neil, who decided that the Biblical version of them wasn’t funny enough. Their International Express delivers them their traditional weapons but otherwise they exist so Terry and Neil can tell jokes. Only War is allowed a single plot point later.
Death, of course, is Death, but not at all in the Biblical horseman sense.
As similar the as they are in may ways, Americans and British have very different views on guns. Americans like myself, are mystified by the general aversion the British have for guns, whereas the British seem to be mystified with our obsession for them. In Men at Arms, we’ll see a gun seemingly take sinister possession of a man. In a Discworld full of deadly crossbows, it’s a stretch to see how a rifle is inherently evil or all that much worse. It’s a culture thing I guess.
For the record, I’m not saying that America has the proper view on guns, their prevalence or their uses. I’m just saying that as an American, the British view comes off as a little weird.
@30: The Four Horsemen show up for the end of the world, or are supposed to. But they’re more or less scenery. Or maybe when the time comes, we’ll find they were right here all along. In Terry’s “Sourcery” they show up for a somewhat Norsey event inasmuch as the frost giants are involved IIRC, or possibly miss it due to a long lunch. Death is seen playing cards with the gang in “The Light Fantastic” and anticipating a call-out before the end of the book. I think in “Thief of Time” most of them cry off.
@31: When you’re holding a hammer the world seems to be made of nails. The latest American cop to shoot some Black guy dead controversially (Daunte Wright, at time of writing) seems to have done it out of habit. Discworld is more or less in the Sword Age, and plenty of those are given a mind of their own, to mess with yours. In “Wyrd Sisters” the crown is full of thoughts you don’t want in your head, though maybe only psychic people really suffer the effect. In “Sourcery” again the Archchancellor’s hat is less fussy that way. Things are dangerous if you let them tell you what to do.
@31
As an American, I find the American obsession with guns to be off-putting and terrifying. I have, in fact, held and shot a gun. It felt too good in my hand and I was able to shoot with some accuracy right off the bat. As someone who has a bad temper, that terrified me.
I don’t like guns. I’ll stick with the British on this one.
@31, 33: I’m an American. And all it takes is listening to the news in any randomly-selected week in these United States, to convince me that the British have a very good point.
@27, re naming children after fictional characters: I once met a ten-year-old boy named Anakin. (I hear that names from Game of Thrones are popular with today’s parents, but I’ve yet to meet any of those babies personally.)
@29: True. There wasn’t much food in that restaurant to begin with, and diners probably tended to eat it quickly. And, true. Famine’s scenes focus on his successful efforts to be appealing, but like Pollution and presumably Pestilence, he probably has had to do most of his work on the sly, or offer short-term solutions that end up worsening our problems. War has always been popular, and trying to end it is generally a harder sell than working to ‘fight’ hunger, diseases, or environmental destruction.
I’m not criticizing the book for inconsistencies and uncertainties regarding the Horsepersons; they just give me more thought-fodder. Like Robert Jordan before them, Pratchett and Gaiman have unintentionally hit the informational sweet spot for me: information abundant enough to keep me pondering and scant enough to keep me wondering
Gaiman, renowned master of nightmare fuel, claims credit for the initial development of the Horsepersons (I’m unsure if this includes clearly-Pratchett-inspired Death), so he’s the one I cussed at when I awoke from nightmares about them and the one I bless when they more enjoyably occupy my mind. Pratchett has a long track record of creating characters that were conceived as short-term comic relief and became beloved regulars, but I admit the Horsepersons didn’t get that kind of fandom traction. They amuse me sometimes, but mean much more to me than that, both positive and negative. I’ve obsessed over many, many fictional villains and monsters in my time, with scant regard to the their intended plot purpose or importance, and am invariably fascinated by anthropomorphic personifications.
@35 @32: In 20th and 21st century Christianity, the horsemen were sent by God to righteously kill the world’s population. Each would kill 1/4 of humanity when they rode, through pestilence, war, famine, and wild beasts (Death’s role to kill the survivors of the first three). They don’t exist before the apocalypse, they are the woes that the writer has known, writ omnipotent and immediate.
@31 (et al): Guns played a different role in American and English history. By the time of personal firearms, the English no longer hunted for food. The Americans did and firearms became prevalent. Before police, they were carried for personal protection and when police forces were formed they were also armed. It is also somewhat England’s fault since the Second Amendment was based on Americans needed to be able to grab their musket and beat back the pesky redcoats. I mean this as an explanation, not a justification (I’d go beyond gun control and add ammunition control).
I started considering the possible percentage breakdown of kills this book’s apocalypse would have brought. Then I stopped, because that’s the major source of my nightmares. Somehow it’s now less scary to imagine them in a friendly competition for destruction of the ‘real world.’ Mostly because I have endless fun composing their conversations and bicker-fests.
@31: the attitude of the British toward guns is shared by most of the rest of the well-off world; the US is the anomaly.
@32: The latest American cop to shoot some Black guy dead controversially (Daunte Wright, at time of writing) seems to have done it out of habit. Today’s New York Times discusses in detail the differences and the similarities between tasers and guns, and note other cases of error. (The BBC had a picture of a taser apparently holstered incorrectly in a way that defeats one of the differences.) This removes it to a “Cold Equations” problem: why is this confusion not made more difficult? Maybe the taser should have a classic Italian fencing grip instead of a pistol grip?
@35: Gaiman could have written Death’s lines; as his Lafferty pastiche shows, he’s an accomplished mimic. (ISTM there’s a degree of similarity between Pratchett’s Death and Gaiman’s Dream; both are a hash of pride, flashes of humanity, and the sort of personality type that in humans is just-doesn’t-understand-other-people.)
@35: yes, there’s certainly still food for thought here, even 30 years after the book came out.
@36: By the time of personal firearms, the English no longer hunted for food.
citation? It’s possible that commoners used snares in some areas because guns were too noisy and hunting was somewhat privileged, but I’m not sure even of that; IIUC the Pilgrims arrived with “fowling pieces”. And firearms were considered necessary for defense long before the Revolution, thanks to North America being the site of a ~proxy war with the French.
@38: For a citation, “An Act of 1671 limited the taking of game to those with a landed income of £100 per year.” (https://www.thefield.co.uk/shooting/history-shotgun-shooting-26590)”
Poaching laws protected the lands of the king, nobles, and private landowners so to put food on the table, commoners who poached favored silent methods instead of guns.
While America has some hunting laws, it’s a relatively recent development.
You are right that firearms were considered necessary for defense (and offense) against Native Americans and the French and Spanish colonists. But the Second Amendment was a direct response to the British and the Revolution.
@39: That’s half a century after NW-European colonists came to North America. However, I’ll grant that handguns (let alone automatics) probably weren’t common until much later.
The history of laws tends to be complicated. I have been told (by a gun-control opponent on another list) that one of the Federalist Papers supports the 2nd Amendment to allow citizens to rise against (their own) overbearing government, not simply to form a defense against outsiders.
Neither of which speaks to the frenzy of the latest half-century or so; from what I could stomach reading, the NRA was relatively sane until it discovered (like later people we don’t need to name) that an extreme-right position would increase its income and clout.
We get G&P’s final comment on guns near the end of the book; they have a point in their context.
Poor people were still hunting (or fishing) for food in the UK in almost living memory, ie at least into the 1930’s. Not as a sole food source, but to supplement what little they could buy.
And yes, most of this was technically poaching, but it was my grandad doing it, so I’m not going to complain.
Of course, because they were poor they couldn’t afford guns, it was snares and fish traps etc.