Good Omens
By: Neil Gaiman, Terry Pratchett / Narrated By: Martin Jarvis
Length: 12 hrs and 32 mins
Heavenly writing. Wickedly funny!
Okay, so I really, really like Neil Gaiman. But I gotta admit to you, Terry Pratchett is sooooo quick, packs sooooo many wallops into so few words, that I had to slow my listening speed down to x1. I missed way too much at x1.25. Then too, you have Martin Jarvis’s masterful narration where he does things like angels getting slowly and mind-blowingly drunk, and I had to keep the speed slow enough cuz I didn’t wanna miss a thing!
We have our bad angel who’s been on earth so long that he’s gone native and is not looking forward to the end of time. He’s having too much fun for it to end. And we have our good angel who has his rare book collection that he doesn’t want destroyed by the Apocalypse, thank you very much. And we have the Antichrist, an adolescent boy who doesn’t realize that he’s turned his gift from Hades—a hellhound—into a simple, bumbling, cat-worrying puppy dog.
Add the Four Motorcyclist of the Apocalypse, “The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter”, a witch hunter, a Jezebel, armies of good, armies of evil, and you have Good Omens, 12 1/2 hours of non stop wickedly clever storytelling.
Hoo boy! It goes by sooooo swiftly, the laughs come by soooo long and hard, that I can’t tell you why I was able to fall asleep during the listening of it not once, not twice, but three times. What was I doing? I can’t explain it. The audiobook is in NO WAY boring. Maybe I just got comic overload, and my mind shut down before it could blow a fuse?
Good Omens was our audiobook club’s pick this week, and it was a hit all around. It’s irreverent without being offensive. It’s intelligently written (TOTALLY!), and it had our little group thinking about the Revelations in a new and utterly delightful way. Armageddon has never been so hilarious.
If you’re up for something fast-paced, and I do mean FAST, give it a listen. Especially if you’re also looking for something with quirky and wonderful characters, characters who don’t talk to plants so much as threaten them, who squawk: Jezebel at their neighbors even whilst accepting plates of liver from them, characters who name themselves Cruelty To Animals so they can hang out with War, Death, Famine, and Pollution.
It’s a fun jaunt, a bumpy ride, and really: Martin Jarvis does a fantastic drunken angel!
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