I loved the TV adaptation of this book that came out as a miniseries a couple of months ago on Amazon Prime Video, and while I don’t always enjoy the books after I have seen their screen adaptations — the reverse is also true; in fact, I typically hate the screen adaptations of the books I love — I thought I would give this one a try. I had not read any books by either Neil Gaiman or Terry Pratchett before — both of whom are such literary heavyweights — and the TV show was so funny and had such a creative plot that I was curious to read the book it had been adapted from.

First, the plot. As I said, it was extremely imaginative as well as clever, not to mention incredibly funny. Inspired by the Bible, it has all the biblical elements including God and Satan, Heaven and Hell, Good and Evil, and Angels and Demons. The story begins, as in the Bible, with the creation of the first man and woman, Adam and Eve, in the Garden of Eden, where Adam is enticed by Eve to eat the forbidden apple, spawning the birth of evil. The two main protagonists of Good Omens are an angel and a demon, Aziraphale and Crowley, who are present at the start, and who, in the course of the centuries since the beginning have become friends, a fact that they take great pains to hide from their respective higher-ups — the angels led by God and the demons lead by Satan respectively.

It is now in the 1980s, and the end of the world is near, but that has to be set in motion by the Antichrist who has to be born and brought up on earth. The book is set in England, and the location for the Apocalypse is a small country town called Tadfield that is close to London. Crowley is charged with taking the demonic baby to a religious hospital in Tadfield where satanic nuns will switch a newborn with the Antichrist baby. But there is a mix-up, and the Antichrist baby, Adam, ends up growing up in a normal house and has a normal childhood. The Apocalypse is scheduled for when the child turns eleven.

Also, it turns out that all of this has been prophesied by a witch in the 17th century, called Agnes Nutter, and there is a whole subplot involving her descendent, Anathema Device, who has Agnes’ book of prophecies and arrives in Tadfield a few days before the prophesied end of the world to try and make sense of the prophecy. (Since the prophecies are written in the 17th century, they are written in a language and style that is hard to decipher.) She happens to meet and get romantically involved — just a few hours before the Apocalypse — with the descendent, Newton Pulsifer, of the witch-hunter who had burned Agnes at the stake in the 17th century.

While there are other subplots in the story — for example, the four horsemen who are supposed to usher in the Apocalypse are, in keeping with the times, “badass” bikers in leather jackets — what ultimately happens is that the Apocalypse is averted through the combined efforts of Aziraphale and Crowley, Anathema and Newton, and the eleven-year old Adam and his group of three close friends.

While this plot may sound somewhat ponderous, even for a fantasy novel, it is so funnily rendered — so witty and so clever — that it never seemed too over-the-top. The quality of the writing, the smarts, and the witticisms were not just true for the book as a whole, but for every page, every paragraph, in fact, almost every sentence of it.

And therein was the problem for me — there was no let-up. When I started the book, I was awed by its sheer brilliance, by how funny and how clever each page was. After a while, however, it became a little too much. With every sentence so finely crafted, every paragraph so full of imagery and sharply written humor, every page so amazingly creative that you have to pause and admire it, my enjoyment gradually turned to exhaustion. It’s almost as if the authors took every single bit of the book and strove to make it as funny and as brilliant as possible. While entirely admirable, this made the book overwrought and got in the way of the story for me.

I never thought a novel could be too clever for its own good, but unfortunately, that is how I felt about Good Omens.

Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch
Authors: Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett                     
Original Publisher and Date: Workman, 1990               
Reprint Publisher and Date: William Morrow, Nov 2006                                            

---

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.

This book had such an intriguing title that I could not help giving it a try when I heard about it. Also, it is a debut novel and it is always wonderful when you find a fresh voice that you like. Here, the debut novelist, Richard Roper, comes from a background in publishing, so it was hardly surprisingly for me to find that the book is well written and draws you in right away.

The title of the book comes from what the protagonist, Andrew, does for a living — he works in the city council department (of a city in the UK) that is tasked with finding the next of kin for those who die alone; and if they cannot be found, to see if the deceased had any money to pay for a funeral; and if that failed too, to give the deceased a barebones funeral. The work involves visiting the homes of such people who have died alone — often living in squalor, with their bodies not discovered until a neighbor or a mail worker smells something bad — and searching through all the mess for any clues about long-lost friends or relatives who could be notified or find any money that could be used to fund a funeral. Andrew tries to make this gruesome work as humane as possible, even attending the funerals of these people, although he is not required to.

Andrew has been doing this work alone until the department gets a new hire, a woman called Peggy, who joins him in the work. She is like-minded in how she goes about it, and together, they make a good team. By this time, you, of course, except this to turn into a love story, and that is exactly what happens. It also marks the point where this well-written, quirky novel degenerates into a very predictable story, with a plot so ludicrous that I almost felt cheated. Andrew has been pretending to his colleagues that he is married with a wife and two kids, and he has been able to keep up that charade for five years until Peggy comes along. She is married too with two kids — for real — but her husband is an alcoholic and the marriage is falling apart. Very conveniently, Andrew falls in love with Peggy and fesses up and tells the truth about his lie, and while Peggy does not divorce her husband and come together with Andrew by the end of the book, she likes Andrew too and we are given to understand that this is what is going to happen.

In another subplot, Andrew is into model trains and is part of an online forum of similar model train enthusiasts, who step up to help him out when he appeals for their support.

It also turns out that Andrew didn’t just conjure up his imaginary wife and kids out of thin air — he actually had a girlfriend he was madly in love with, who died in a freak accident.

By this point, the book had degenerated so much from its promising start that I couldn’t wait to finish it and move on to something else.

The book ends with Andrew and Peggy getting together to start a charity which could spend more time and resources to track down people who died alone and at the very least, arrange for volunteers to go to their funerals so they would at least have some people in attendance.

While I found the description of the work that Andrew does fascinating — I had not even thought of what happens to people who die alone without any friends or family — it was such a pity that the book degenerated into something so hackneyed and predictable after what seemed to me a very promising start.

How Not to Die Alone
Author: Richard Roper
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Publication Date: May 2019

---

Contributor: Lachmi Khemlani runs a technology publication in the San Francisco Bay Area.