#marta rereads good omens

[marta-bee]

I’m finishing up the first chapter of Good Omens and while I’m too tired for a proper liveblog or reaction post, it’s still all really good, especially the little scenes with the Four Horsemen. The politics, the disasters they worry about is just so thoroughly late ‘80s/early ‘90s, because of course it is, that’s when the book was published. But it’s also around the time of my earliest political memories (I would have been about eight), so it’s just really fun seeing those times skewered so thoroughly. Can you be nostalgic for the likes of Chernobyl, Exxon Valdez, the Iran-Contra affair, and the fall of the Berlin Wall? The word choice seems odd; but the point still holds. It’s such fun to see that specific period get a skewering.

Reading the bit about Nanny Ashtoreth (... *blinks* Really, Crowley? There’s a whole post owed to that name choice ....), I found myself thinking about Mycroft of all people. I know the timelines don’t quite line up with the book, but think about it. Foreign diplomat. Surrounded by a steady stream of lurking evil presences checking up on Warlock (so constantly milling about). Crowley himself would definitely give off a Certain Vibe, and it’s not totally impossible Mycroft might recognize a certain kinship with a certain former British Intelligence operative. I can easily see him being drawn in to the whole situation, suspicious of the absolute dud that is the Ineffables’ involvement with Warlock. And even if it doesn’t make sense plot-wise, the possibilities are just hilarious, truly.

Someone really should write that fic, because I’d like to read it.

Also? Crowley loves The Golden Girls, which is simply delightful.

I did love letting all these quiet vignettes, the grace-notes and parentheticals, just wash over me. It’s a nice headspace to sit in for a while. And even if I’m not thinking too hard or having much specific to say beyond “I liked this bit,” what I just said is still quite true.

[marta-bee]

Let’s talk about good and evil, Good Omens-style. 

Pressing on with reading the book, I’m maybe two-thirds or three-quarters through the first chapter. Still not through! But War has made her first appearance, Aziraphale and Crowley are finally sobered p and decided to be god-parents, and I think I’m ready for another mental break. It’s hilarious. It’s harrowing. I am marveling at the sheer genius of the writing. And feeling for Aziraphale being stuck in his own goodness. He’s a cheeky bastard what with the bible-proof pages and all, but still so hemmed in by what he’s defined himself to be. 

Mostly I think I need to take a break, because there’s some really interesting philosophy going on here and I need to unpack it a bit to really feel his weight. 

Last week I’d stopped with Crowley and the Spanish Inquisition. Still feeling the *oomph* of that passage; but this week starts out with its flip-side, which had such an aura of hope to it, for me.

And just when you'd think they were more malignant than ever Hell could be, they could occasionally show more grace than Heaven ever dreamed of. Often the same individual was involved. It was this free-will thing, of course. It was a bugger.

That’s one of my favorite things about humanity, how we’re capable of what my human-bound sense of morality connects with goodness. We’re both. We’re potential. And I think for Crowley, that potential is almost more important than what we potentialize into. Maybe it’s that humans have creativity and a spark that lets them do things stolid heaven and decrepit hell just can’t conceive of. But there’s something very attractive to Crowley about this ability change, to make a choice and not just do or be what they’re predestined to do or be, that’s very attractive to Crowley. If anything connects to what I think of as morality in this world, I think that ability for growth is it. A capacity to surprise and spersede your programming, for lack of a better term.

There’s actually a really delightful exchange I’d forgotten about, on the concept of free will, leading up to that snippet I quoted earlier:

Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he'd said-this was somewhere around 1020, when they'd first reached their little Arrangement-the whole point was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked.

Crowley had thought about this for some time and, around 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can't start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.

Ah, Aziraphale had said, that's the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have. Crowley had said, That's lunatic.

No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

Aziraphale. The Enemy, of course. But an enemy for six thousand years now, which made him a sort of friend.

Crowley reached down and picked up the car phone.

Being a demon, of course, was supposed to mean you had no free will. But you couldn't hang around humans for very long without learning a thing or two.

Angels and demons can’t change; except of course they can. That’s the whole point of Satan, as Crowley points out later:

"What will happen to the child if it doesn't get a Satanic upbringing, though?" said Aziraphale. "Probably nothing. It'll never know."

"But genetics-"

"Don't tell me from genetics. What've they got to do with it?" said Crowley. "Look at Satan. Created as an angel, grows up to be the Great Adversary. Hey, if you're going to go on about genetics, you might as well say the kid will grow up to be an angel. After all, his father was really big in Heaven in the old days. Saying he'll grow up to be a demon just because his dad became one is like saying a mouse with its tail cut off will give birth to tailless mice. No. Upbringing is everything. Take it from me."

"And without unopposed Satanic influences – "

"Well, at worst Hell will have to start all over again. And the Earth gets at least another eleven years. That's got to be worth something, hasn't it?"

Now Aziraphale was looking thoughtful again.

"You're saying the child isn't evil of itself?" he said slowly.

"Potentially evil. Potentially good, too, I suppose. Just this huge powerful potentiality, waiting to be shaped," said Crowley. He shrugged. "Anyway, why're we talking about this good and evil? They're just names for sides. We know that."

"I suppose it's got to be worth a try," said the angel.

Satan can change. Satan did change. And Crowley, too, in the first passage; he decided to make a choice when that’s supposed to be very much a human thing. Even Aziraphale shows a real capacity to, not change his mind perhaps, but let himself be swayed, certainly That whole conversation between Aziraphale and Crowley over what to do about the antichrist reeks of motivated reasoning on his part.

"That's it, then," said Crowley, with a gleam of triumph. He knew Aziraphale's weak spot all right. "No more compact discs. No more Albert Hall. No more Proms. No more Glyndbourne. Just celestial harmonies all day long."

"Ineffable," Aziraphale murmured.

"Like eggs without salt, you said. Which reminds me. No salt, no eggs. No gravlax with dill sauce. No fascinating little restaurants where they know you. No Daily Telegraph crossword. No small antique shops. No bookshops, either. No interesting old editions. No" – Crowley scraped the bottom of Aziraphale's barrel of interests-"Regency silver snuffboxes . . . "

"But after we win life will be better!" croaked the angel.

"But it won't be as interesting. Look, you know I'm right. You'd be as happy with a harp as I'd be with a pitchfork."

He’s supposed to want good. He’s with heaven, that’s the definition of being heaven-aligned, to want good; and taking better as a synonym... yeah, probably if the win the Apocalypse (which they probably would), life would be more good. And that thought makes Aziraphale desperate; he’s croaking the words there, see? He’s torn between what he’s supposed to want and what he actually wants, and it’s all coming to a head. 

Then Crowley said it won’t be as interesting, something else entirely, from the heaven- or hell-aligned, and that’s when he starts to crack. It’s a rebellion, or at least a falling (sauntering vaguely downward, if you prefer); because he’s choosing something here too outside what he’s supposed to be working toward: not better, but more interesting. And thank Someone for that.

Let’s go back to that first exchange, though, where Aziraphale and Crowley are discussing free will. Because Crowley makes a really interesting point, both narratively and in terms of real-world philosophy.

Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can't start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a castle.

Ah, Aziraphale had said, that's the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have. Crowley had said, That's lunatic.

Aziraphale’s line is one I heard often enough from the Protestant-Christian side of my upbringing. Blessed are those who suffer for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. And Crowley’s right: it’s nonsense to think people who are fighting all day every day to survive will ever be able to do as well at this free choice sanctification scheme as people who have the luxury of a bit of breathing space. Free will, for one thing, is meaningless if you don’t actually have two options to choose from; and the space (mental and otherwise) to actually make a decision.

Personally this isn’t the interpretation of Christianity I’ve found most useful, or consistent with the way I read the (Christian) Bible. It’s not that suffering gives you more opportunities for growth; there’s a sense of to-whom-much-has-been-given-much-will-be-expected shot through so many of Christ’s parables (the Five Talents, for instance), and of course there’s the line that it’s easier for a rich man to pass through the Eye of the Needle than to get into heaven; if you know your Biblical archaeology, that’s essentially saying you have to be stripped free of your baggage, which is the one thing rich people won’t be able to do.

Put another way: those who suffer, those who are poor and week, are blessed not because their suffering lets them achieve more heaven-points, but because they don’t need them precisely because they’re small. Whereas those given more resources, more is expected of them. I don’t think Crowley would approve of that kind of valorizing of smallness, but intellectually at least it makes more sense than what Crowley’s been twisted to think is correct.

I’m more a fan of the Aristotelian approach, myself. There are virtues that ought to motivate actions, but at the same time it’s all tied up in what’s possible for an individual. So a person who’s, say, OCD and deals with excessive anxiety might show more genuine courage in crossing the street than someone without that psychology would need to run into a burning building. Of course there’s certain maladies that make it impossible to exercise true virtue and we should feel pity for those people even if we don’t think of them as virtuous. But at least within certain limits, courage isn’t just about doing the most extreme thing, even necessarily what the situation demands, because courage is being guided by fear in the right way so we behave courageously; and if you’ve got more fear to navigate you need better courage than most to do the navigating.

That’s a much better way of thinking about things to me. Afflicted people aren’t better than those with a better starting out point because they get more heaven-points (whatever form that takes) or reach some better external state than people with a more favorable starting point; it’s that to even get to the same result as other people, they need more oomph, more grace, more whatever, because of all they’re pushing back against. It’s not fair, but it seems at least a more generous interpretation of the reality we’re all trying to struggle through.

Getting back to the book, though, I find it really interesting that Aziraphale and Crowley think of good and evil in these terms. It’s a sign of the headspace Heaven and Hell drive them toward, I think; to the point Crowley says they’re just labels for our side, those words don’t actually mean anything. 

But he’s still shaken by Barcelona. He’s still begging with Aziraphale- test them, sure, but not to destruction. He doesn’t want humanity to be ended, and it’s not for the more self-centered reasons that drive Aziraphale here, those lovely little bits of life on earth he finds so enjoyable. There’s a sense that he shouldn’t allow that to happen. There’s a should, an ought, a moral imperative still, even for a demon who’s been trying to tempt humanity toward his side for six millennia here. And while I don’t want to indulge on simple moralizing, there’s something at his core that won’t let him just let history do its thing. It may not neatly align with what heaven or hell is pointing for, that’s really the point, but there’s still an ought in play that’s somehow independent of all that.

Frankly, I find all that fascinating, not to mention a damned compelling narrative.

And War’s up next, I see. I need a readerly break, but when I get back, I think things are about to get fun.

[marta-bee]

Continuing on with book-Good Omens. Let me just start with two general observations.

Neil Gaiman, or possibly Terry Pratchett, or both, are just ridiculously funny. The humor shot throughout here is some of the cleverest things I’ve read in a long time. The parentheticals! Mister Dowling being so painfully British in a provincial way given the antichrist meant to be cosmopolitan and international, just.... all of it.

Those chapters are just so durned long. Any editor worth their salt would break this one into at least three or four, and boo on them, because I can’t imagine anything being quite so fun as the way the different sections weave together in such interesting ways. It just keeps going.

More substantively, let’s talk about Crowley again, and evil, and people being people. Because one of the aspects I’m finding most interesting in this opening chapter is how it’s not being good or evil that makes you good or bad. Or destructive. Or the characters I should root for or against at an intuitive moral level. I’m actually having a failure of language here, but speaking as a philosopher even so early it’s something that strikes me as a very interesting take on the concepts. True, and also real.

Take this description of one of the chattering nuns:

Sister Mary Loquacious has been a devout Satanist since birth. She went to Sabbat School as a child and won black stars for handwriting and liver. When she was told to join the Chattering Order she went obediently, having a natural talent in that direction and, in any case, knowing that she would be among friends. She would be quite bright, if she was ever put in a position to find out, but long ago found that being a scatterbrain, as she'd put it, gave you an easier journey through life. Currently she is being handed a golden-haired male baby we will call the Adversary, Destroyer of Kings, Angel of the Bottomless Pit, Great Beast that is called Dragon, Prince of This World, Father of Lies, Spawn of Satan, and Lord of Darkness.

And then later:

Most of the members of the convent were old-fashioned Satanists, like their parents and grandparents before them. They'd been brought up to it and weren't, when you got right down to it, particularly evil. Human beings mostly aren't. They just get carried away by new ideas, like dressing up in jackboots and shooting people, or dressing up in white sheets and lynching people, or dressing up in tie-dye jeans and playing guitars at people. Offer people a new creed with a costume and their hearts and minds will follow. Anyway, being brought up as a Satanist tended to take the edge off it. It was something you did on Saturday nights. And the rest of the time you simply got on with life as best you could, just like everyone else. Besides, Sister Mary was a nurse and nurses, whatever their creed, are primarily nurses, which had a lot to do with wearing your watch upside down, keeping calm in emergencies, and dying for a cup of tea. She hoped someone would come soon; she'd done the important bit, now she wanted her tea.

It may help to understand human affairs to be clear that 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.

Usually when we talk about good and evil not being as starkly different, there’s an element of moral nihilism, or at least relativism, this feeling that that means everything is equally right or wrong. And again I’m struggling with language here because good/evil and right/wrong are usually thought to be, if not synonyms, at least strongly parallel concepts. So if you don’t have good and evil or they don’t function in the same way, then of course you affect right and wrong in much the same way. But this seems to be doing something quite different. Good and evil are more like warring tribes than moral distinctions, what we should root for and against. But there’s still something of morality shot through here. People may be people which means liking dressing up on a Saturday night apparently, and that may explain why they’re just as likely to dress up in white sheets or jackboots as tie-dye; but of course the result is nowhere near the same.

And Crowley gets that, probably better than anyone.

Crowley had always known that he would be around when the world ended, because he was immortal and wouldn't have any alternative. But he'd hoped it would be a long way off.

Because he rather liked people. It was a major failing in a demon.

Oh, he did his best to make their short lives miserable, because that was his job, but nothing he could think up was half as bad as the stuff they thought up themselves. They seemed to have a talent for it. It was built into the design, somehow. They were born into a world that was against them in a thousand little ways, and then devoted most of their energies to making it worse. Over the years Crowley had found it increasingly difficult to find anything demonic to do which showed up against the natural background of generalized nastiness. There had been times, over the past millennium, when he'd felt like sending a message back Below saying, Look, we may as well give up right now, we might as well shut down Dis and Pandemonium and everywhere and move up here, there's nothing we can do to them that they don't do themselves and they do things we've never even thought of, often involving electrodes. They've got what we lack. They've got imagination. And electricity, of course.

One of them had written it, hadn't he . . . "Hell is empty, and all the devils are here."

Crowley had got a commendation for the Spanish Inquisition. He had been in Spain then, mainly hanging around cantinas in the nicer parts, and hadn't even known about it until the commendation arrived. He'd gone to have a look, and had come back and got drunk for a week.

That Hieronymous Bosch. What a weirdo.

There’s an interpretation I read years ago, that Crowley’s brilliance as a demon comes down to project management, not hatred or bile or the like, and that that doesn’t make him less demonic. I like that and quite agree with it; it makes him much more modern, and much more influenced by humanity I think, than Hastur and Ligur; but it’s obviously not getting in the way of him doing a good job. What’s so interesting here is this isn’t a project that requires a lot of management at all. 

Is it the deep affect of sin? The world is corrupted and broken etc.? That seems completely wrong for this book, and, for the record, my personal moral and theological intuitions. Or is it that there’s something about the demonic that’s integral to the Great Plan that it’s sort of hard-coded into humanity? The asking of questions, the breaking of things so change is even possible? Or, more uncomfortably, is this need to hurt somehow more natural than we’d like it to be? The flipside of the urge to protect, perhaps, paired with the much less admirable tendency to divide groups too large for us to really bond with into us and them, our side and people our side needs to be protected from?

Maybe. I don’t have hard answers here for myself, let alone for Neil and Terry. But what I do see is Crowley is sd about that. He’d torture and hurt because that was his job, but I think he also wanted humanity to be better than that. Which they are, some of them and some of th time, but when they aren’t: hoo boy. It hurts him. It hurts me. But damned if it isn’t also compelling. I’m definitely looking forward to how this distinction (or lack of same) develops. 

.... And on that note, I just saw Aziraphale’s name mentioned for the first time since the Garden. This seems like a good place to stop and read other things so I can return refreshed, because as I said these chapters are long. 

[marta-bee]

Pressing on with Book-Omens...

"Prob'ly get run over by a big black car," said Brian, picking at a scab on a dirty knee. He brightened up. "Do you know," he said, "my cousin said that in America there's shops that sell thirty-nine different flavors of ice cream?"

This even silenced Adam, briefly.

"There aren't thirty-nine flavors of ice cream," said Pepper. "There aren't thirty-nine flavors in the whole world."

"There could be, if you mixed them up," said Wensleydale, blinking owlishly. "You know. Strawberry and chocolate. Chocolate and vanilla." He sought for more English flavors. "Strawberry and vanilla and chocolate," he added lamely.

And if that’s not the funniest thing, speaking as an American with time spent living Elsewhere. We really do have an absurd number of ice-cream flavors, and it doesn’t strike us as odd.

[marta-bee]

Let’s talk about Pepper. Because I’ve been reading Good Omens again, and the book-specific bits are just too much fun not to share.

First, she’s a girl obviously, but a girl named Pippin (for a start), and a girl with that precise blend of hippie optimism and commonsense no-nonsense attitude that makes her such a force to be reckoned with. She is vicious, but in a truly fun way.

If it had been Wensley who had said that, there'd have been a half-hearted scuffle, as between friends. But the other Them had long ago learned that Pepper did not consider herself bound by the informal conventions of brotherly scuffles. She could kick and bite with astonishing physiological accuracy for a girl of eleven. Besides, at eleven years old the Them were beginning to be bothered by the dim conception that laying hands on good ole Pep moved things into blood-thumping categories they weren't entirely at home with yet, besides earning you a snake-fast blow that would have floored the Karate Kid.

But she was good to have in your gang. They remembered with pride the time when Greasy Johnson and his gang had taunted them for playing with a girl. Pepper had erupted with a fury that had caused Greasy's mother to come round that evening and complain.

[Greasy Johnson was a sad and oversized child. There's one in every school; not exactly fat, but simply huge and wearing almost the same size clothes as his father. Paper tore under his tremendous fingers, pens shattered in his grip. Children whom he tried to play with in quiet, friendly games ended up getting under his huge feet, and Greasy Johnson had become a bully almost in self-defense. After all, it was better to be called a bully, which at least implied some sort of control and desire, than to be called a big clumsy oaf. He was the despair of the sports master, because if Greasy Johnson had taken the slightest interest in sport, then the school could have been champions. But Greasy Johnson had never found a sport that suited him. He was instead secretly devoted to his collection of tropical fish, which won him prizes. Greasy Johnson was the same age as Adam Young, to within a few hours, and his parents had never told him he was adopted. See? You were right about the babies.] Pepper looked upon him, a giant male, as a natural enemy.

She herself had short red hair and a face which was not so much freckled as one big freckle with occasional areas of skin.

That red hair bit is interesting, because it makes such an interesting visual connection to War, doesn’t it? Also it would have had me picturing a white, practically Irish or Scottish child with flaming red locks blowing in the wind, like Merida from Brave. Or maybe Molly Weasley taking on Beatrix Lestrange in the final Harry Potter book. Having her played by a black child actress is really interesting; not that black characters can’t have red hair -- Halle Berry’s Ariel, for instance -- but unconscious biases being what they are, that’s not where my brain went. Kudos to the Good Omens fandom for this not being much of a thing, at least to the extent I was involved back in 2019.

Also, I hope I’m not being insensitive to describe her as black. Most of my more PC descriptors come with an -American hyphenate, which obviously isn’t right; and a quick search for Amma Ris’s background just describes her as Welsh. Which of course she is; and somehow simply Welsh is like a breath of fresh air.)

Anywho. Getting back to the chapter.

Pepper's given first names were Pippin Galadriel Moonchild. She had been given them in a naming ceremony in a muddy valley field that contained three sick sheep and a number of leaky polythene teepees. Her mother had chosen the Welsh valley of Pant-y-Gyrdl as the ideal site to Return to Nature. (Six months later, sick of the rain, the mosquitoes, the men, the tent-trampling sheep who ate first the whole commune's marijuana crop and then its antique minibus, and by now beginning to glimpse why almost the entire drive of human history has been an attempt to get as far away from Nature as possible, Pepper's mother returned to Pepper's surprised grandparents in Tadfield, bought a bra, and enrolled in a sociology course with a deep sigh of relief.)

There are only two ways a child can go with a name like Pepper Galadriel Moonchild, and Pepper had chosen the other one: the three male Them had learned this on their first day of school, in the playground, at the age of four.

They had asked her her name, and, all innocent, she had told them.

Subsequently, a bucket of water had been needed to separate Pippin Galadriel Moonchild's teeth from Adam's shoe. Wensleydale's first pair of spectacles had been broken, and Brian's sweater needed five stitches.

The Them were together from then on, and Pepper was Pepper forever, except to her mother, and (when they were feeling especially courageous, and the Them were almost out of earshot) Greasy Johnson and the Johnsonites, the village's only other gang.

“Pepper was Pepper forever.” She sure as heck is, isn’t she? I do believe I’m in love. She also has a little sister who’s as fair game for punching down on as any tomboyish eleven year old ever was; and just as unskilled at it. (Though she does get away with it in the end; just not with quite as much dignity as she might have preferred.)

"Art thou a witch, oh lay?" said the chief Inquisitor.

"Yes," said Pepper's little sister, who was six and built like a small golden-haired football. "You mustn't say yes, you've got to say no," hissed the Head Torturer, nudging the suspect. "And then what?" demanded the suspect.

"And then we torture you to make you say yes," said the Head Torturer. "I told you. It's good fun, the torturin'. It doesn't hurt. Hastar lar visa," she added quickly.

The little suspect gave the décor of the Inquisitorial headquarters a disparaging look. There was a decided odor of onions.

"Huh," she said. "I want to be a witch, wiv a warty nose an' a green skin an' a lovely cat an' I'd call it Blackie, an' lots of potions an'-"

The Head Torturer nodded to the Chief Inquisitor.

"Look," said Pepper, desperately, "no one's saying you can't be a witch, you jus' have to say you're not a witch. No point in us taking all this trouble," she added severely, "if you're going to go round saying yes the minute we ask you."

The suspect considered this.

"But I wants to be a witch," she wailed. The male Them exchanged exhausted glances. This was out of their league.

"If you just say no," said Pepper. "You can have my Sindy stable set. I've never ever used it," she added, glaring at the other them and daring them to make a comment.

"You have used it," snapped her sister, "I've seen it and it's all worn out and the bit where you put the hay is broke and-"

Adam gave a magisterial cough.

"Art thou a witch, viva Espana?" he repeated.

The sister took a look at Pepper's face, and decided not to chance it. "No," she decided.

This whole scene has such an air of childish logic that’s quite logical to the child. There are squabbles and meanness but also camaraderie, and an appeal to reason that seems to make good sense to them. And, in addition to reminding me of how well these authors wrote other children and gave weight to their emotional realities (I’m thinking of Coraline in particular), it also drives home just how young eleven really is. This is the cohort of our feared antichrist. Reality shapes itself according to his whims; and look how whim-like those whims really are for all of them. They’re real to them, though, which is probably enough. Terrifying, if frightfully real.

I’m a bit rushed today but couldn’t quite resist sharing all these book-specific bits with all of you. So fun! But so... telling.

This section also includes Adam’s first meeting with Anathema, which is just an utterly fascinating look at how our expectations blind us to the reality of the situation. But that’s worth its own post, and needs more time than I have to give just now anyway. Hopefully in a day or two.

For now: “Pepper is perfection and really my kind of character” is conclusion enough for one day. She really, really is.

[marta-bee]

Good Omens reading time. :-) 

Young Warlock and Adam are finally eleven, or nearly. The time for nannies and tutors and satanic nuns and what-not is past. The Hellhound approacheth. And let me tell you, if things had to get so colossally mixed up it’s damned lucky (or something in any case) that they got mixed up in precisely this way. 

See, if you’ve only seen the miniseries you’d be excused for thinking Warlock is a charmingly normal preteen boy. He likes his video games. He tells charming little stories in a lisp about how the gardener says he must always be careful not to hurt slugs. He’s bored with his mother and really would have preferred teenage mutant ninja turtles or some such rather than magicians for his birthday, but he’s basically a normal boy his age. Which he is in a way, at least for his family’s being so rich and privileged. And that’s precisely the problem, isn’t it?

"You, my fine jack-sauce. Come here. Now, if you inspect your breast pocket, I think you might find a fine silk handkerchief."

"Nossir. 'Mafraidnotsir," said the guard, staring straight ahead.

Aziraphale winked desperately. "No, go on, dear boy, take a look, please. "

The guard reached a hand inside his inside pocket, looked surprised, and pulled out a handkerchief, duck-egg-blue silk, with lace edging. Aziraphale realized almost immediately that the lace had been a mistake, as it caught on the guard's holstered gun, and sent it spinning across the room to land heavily in a bowl of jelly.

The children applauded spasmodically. "Hey, not bad!" said the pony-tailed girl. Warlock had already run across the room, and grabbed the gun.

"Hands up, dogbreaths!" he shouted gleefully. The security guards were in a quandary.

Some of them fumbled for their own weapons; others started edging their way toward, or away from, the boy. The other children started complaining that they wanted guns as well, and a few of the more forward ones started trying to tug them from the guards who had been thoughtless enough to take their weapons out.

Then someone threw some jelly at Warlock.

The boy squeaked, and pulled the trigger of the gun. It was a Magnum .32, CIA issue, gray, mean, heavy, capable of blowing a man away at thirty paces, and leaving nothing more than a red mist, a ghastly mess, and a certain amount of paperwork.

Aziraphale blinked.

A thin stream of water squirted from the nozzle and soaked Crowley, who had been looking out the window, trying to see if there was a huge black dog in the garden.

Aziraphale looked embarrassed.

Then a cream cake hit him in the face. It was almost five past three.

This is a child with no real concept of consequences. He and his friends (or guests, at least) aren’t precisely bad, they’re eleven and clearly haven’t spent much of those eleven years learning a thing or two about consequences. So when a gun pops out by accident, their first instinct is to go “Cool!” Warlock reaches out and grabs it; a lot of his guests try to unarm their own guards so they can have the same.

I tell you, 23 years post-Columbine, this whole scene just hits differently. The girl’s comment (forgive the slur; this is a quote) that Aziraphale was “rubbish, and probably a faggot” has a different impact too. But I’m old enough to remember the slur bit was definitely learned behavior, that while there was certainly very serious homophobia in the world, not everyone used language like that quite so casually. This is something that girl has heard from the adults in her life, she knows it’s meant to hurt, but she sees no reason not to sling it around so casually. Because for her there isn’t. She has a thought, she does it. And similarly for Warlock: he sees a gun, goes “cool!”, grabs it up, gets surprised by a bit of flying jelly, and pulls the trigger.

Today we have a word for this: affluenza. I don’t think I’d have known it if I read Good Omens back when it was published. And this was pre-Brock Turner and so many others like him, so I don’t think I would have been as attuned to how dangerous it really is. Even now, I’m more likely to view this as people being deeply damaged by the system that enables them more than being really bad people, even though the solution has to be more responsibility and consequences, not less. I pity them, up to a point at least, even as I hate the thought of them going unpunished for the harm they cause.

But just think of an eleven-year-old Brock Turner being the actual antichrist. What a bullet to have dodged! (If you’ll pardon the pun.) Thank Someone. And what a chilling realization to realize just how many of these kids grow up to have that same power to shift reality to their whims. Though arguably that’s a big part of the point.

Moving on to Adam, he really does strike me as this decent, normal kid. Not particularly good or bad, just normal like I and my friends were at eleven. And it strikes me he’s surrounded by actual individuals. Wensley, who “all that separated this voice from chartered accountancy was a matter of time.” Pepper, so attuned to sexism and fairness who we later learn was raised on a hippie commune. They bring their own bits and emphases to this normal act of play; I don’t remember that we were ever even given a name for any of Warlock’s guests. And that strikes me as important. Adam, for all his untapped power, isn’t used to thinking of himself as the only one that matters.

Aside from all that, though, there’s just great fun writing throughout this section, generally, but this is probably my favorite:

There was a thoughtful pause. The hound slunk closer, and realized that the voices were coming from a hole in the ground.

The trees in fact concealed an ancient chalk quarry, now half overgrown with thorn trees and vines. Ancient, but clearly not disused. Tracks crisscrossed it; smooth areas of slope indicated regular use by skateboards and Wall-of-Death, or at least Wall-of-Seriously-Grazed-Knee, cyclists. Old bits of dangerously frayed rope hung from some of the more accessible greenery. Here and there sheets of corrugated iron and old wooden boards were wedged in branches. A burnt-out, rusting Triumph Herald Estate was visible, half-submerged in a drift of nettles.

In one corner a tangle of wheels and corroded wire marked the site of the famous Lost Graveyard where the supermarket trolleys came to die.

If you were a child, it was paradise. The local adults called it The Pit.

If you know your Bible, you might perk up at that name. It was a kind ofmetaphor for Sheol, which most of us would connect with Hell (not 100% accurately, but also not entirely wrong either). For Adam it’s a paradise of sorts, and the weird thing is he’s not wrong. I would have loved to build forts and poke at slugs with sticks in a bit of wilderness just like this.

The bits about the dog are brilliant, too, but scattered about and hard to quote to give you the full effect. You should really read them if you have the book, though. They definitely left me smiling. Though I’m not 100% at ease. A Hound is still a Hound, after all, even if he now answers to Dog.

[marta-bee]

Talking about angels and demons, free will and choosing has me thinking quite a lot about the bit of Augustine I remember from grad school, specifically how Satan could fall when he had a perfect will and perfect knowledge of good and evil when he was the most powerful of the angels. I don’t remember the specifics of his answer, just that i didn’t find it very compelling at the time. But it seemed like an interesting way of framing the question.

I must say I quite like Neil’s and/or Terry’s answer better. “I was just asking questions; that’s all it took in the beginning.” Because what a profound rebellion that would have been, and how necessary for the world to grow. You could make a strong case the world was perfectly complete in the beginning, pre-Fall. Every need was met, every good thing existed; but it wasn’t until you broke the world that you gave it a chance to grow into something greater still. Questioning meant asking what else there could be, whether it could also be worth having or seeing or whatever. And the answer to that is a resounding (if you’ll forgive the obvious pun) “hell yes.” No wonder Crowley had to leave the state of grace that came before In the Beginning. No wonder Adam (both Adam’s!) had to eventually leave the garden. But equally, no wonder it was the right thing for them to do just as they did.

The better, or at least the more interesting question is: does God have free will? Arguably no, in Christian medieval philosophy at least; because it’s in Their Nature that they always have to do what’s best and they always know what that is. I quite prefer the God of Abraham myself, haggling with Abraham outside Sodom on how many righteous residents it would take for God to spare the city; but equally I’m repulsed and scared by Them. As if one, or even none, isn’t enough. As if They needed convincing.

I’ve also been fascinated by how Manichaean Heaven and Hell are turning out to be here. If you don’t know, that’s the explanation for evil that there are two gods, one good and one evil, and neither can defeat the other at least right away; so evil is the result of the good god not being able to protect the world from the evil one. And it’s widely considered a heresy because it means God isn’t all-powerful. Look at the beginning of Job, for instance, where God must allow Satan to make Job suffer. Satan can’t do it on his own. What’s interesting is at least so far we basically do have a kind of Manichaeanism only because God has stepped back and is letting the roughly equal ranks of angels and demons duke it out themselves. It’s vaguely Tolkienesque in a lot of ways. And it does make for a much better story, though my stomach’s a bit turned to how committed to the part God is; letting humanity be tested to destruciton, never mind the whales and gorillas and the Kraken and all the rest. By real-word theological standards, that’s just rude.

I’m really trying hard to enjoy this world on its own terms and not bring my academic and intellectual baggage into this universe when I suspect it’s not really part of the worldbuilding. Still: once a medieval philosophy ABD, always a medieval philosophy ABD, and my brain won’t quite stop yammering about these kinds of things.

[marta-bee]

Entering (or Leaving) the Garden

Let's talk about Anathema and Adam's first meeting in Good Omens (the book). I mentioned it when talking about Pepper earlier, but as I said, this really deserves its own post.

Adam has come from reenacting his own version of the Spanish Inquisition. He doesn't actually see what's so wrong with witches, in spite of God being "dead set against" it, and the whole inquisition thing seems more like a bit of fun to fill a summer day. But still, Adam's coming away from that feeling like he was just getting into a good rhythm that would fix this witches problem properly and so be for the greater good (though he's not exactly clear on why or how), when his parents punish him for ruining Pepper's sister's dress, and he gets a bad case of the grumblies.

This is just the kind of emotional landscape that gets people to lash out at an easy target. I'm thinking American nativism and racism where people lose their jobs and attack the immigrant they perceive as having stole it, rather than the true culprits. Or the hate crimes against Asian-Americans during COVID though you're Asian-connected neighbors of course had absolutely nothing to do with it, even if a few Chinese scientists did (which, you know, is far from proven). You can probably think of other situations like that. The point is, Adam feels wronged and a the woman he thinks is responsible for that wronging should make a mighty enticing target.

She is one, of course (or nearly), but she doesn't look the part:

"They just better not come running to me when ole Picky is turned into a frog, that's all," muttered Adam.

It was at this point that two facts dawned on him. One was that his disconsolate footsteps had led him past Jasmine Cottage. The other was that someone was crying.

Adam was a soft touch for tears. He hesitated a moment, and then cautiously peered over the hedge.

To Anathema, sitting in a deck chair and halfway through a packet of Kleenex, it looked like the rise of a small, dishevelled sun.

Adam doubted that she was a witch. Adam had a very clear mental picture of a witch. The Youngs restricted themselves to the only possible choice amongst the better class of Sunday newspaper, and so a hundred years of enlightened occultism had passed Adam by. She didn't have a hooked nose or warts, and she was young . . . well, quite young. That was good enough for him.

For her part, Anathema is there looking for exactly who Adam is. She's meant to... what, diffuse some threat about him? Bear witness? Make sure a prophecy is fulfilled in some way? I'm not 100% clear, actually, but she's probably meant to find him. She's in tears because she's lost the Book that would point to him. And there he is, peeking over the hedge at her. But he's also not what she's been primed to suspect, even of the neighborhood ne'er-do-well.

"Hallo," he said, unslouching.

She blew her nose and stared at him.

What was looking over the hedge should be described at this point. What Anathema saw was, she said later, something like a prepubescent Greek god. Or maybe a Biblical illustration, one which showed muscular angels doing some righteous smiting. It was a face that didn't belong in the twentieth century. It was thatched with golden curls which glowed. Michelangelo should have sculpted it.

He probably would not have included the battered sneakers, frayed jeans, or grubby T-shirt, though. "Who're you?" she said.

"I'm Adam Young," said Adam. "I live just down the lane."

"Oh. Yes, I've heard of you," said Anathema, dabbing at her eyes. Adam preened. "Mrs. Henderson said I was to be sure to keep an eye out for you," she went on. "I'm well known around here," said Adam.

"She said you were born to hang," said Anathema.

Adam grinned. Notoriety wasn't as good as fame, but was heaps better than obscurity.

"She said you were the worst of the lot of Them," said Anathema, looking a little more cheerful.

Adam nodded.

"She said, 'You watch out for Them, Miss, they're nothing but a pack of ringleaders. That young Adam's full of the Old Adam,' " she said.

 Side-note: Huzzah for Neil and Terry, on that "worst of the lot of Them" line. A++ wordplay, that...

Also: "Full of the Old Adam"? If only; better that than the anti-Adam, really.

But getting back to my main point, I can't imagine Anathema being turned off by him being a hellion. Antichrist, sure, but punk with a reputation of getting the local busybodies' panties in a twist? That seems just the type she'd gravitate toward. He's more sympathetic than even that, though, isn't he? "Like a prepubescent Greek god. Or maybe a Biblical illustration.", indeed.

So not only is she primed to sympathize with him for stirring shit up, he's genuinely charming and beautiful and just plain young. I wonder if Greasy Johnson had come bumbling down the lane, with all his heft that suggests bully even as he seems pretty kind-hearted and gentle for an eleven-year-old boy, how she would have reacted. He seems to fit the stereotype of what Anathema's looking for much more easily. I don't think she would have disliked him for that, but probably also much less intrigued by and friendly toward him. Adam is the Bart Simpson to Greasy's Nelson Muntz, and we can't help but love him for it. At least I can't, and I suspect Anathema couldn't either.

Odd how our expectations and assumptions so easily work against us.

 .......

The really interesting question for me is if reality's better or worse for this chance meeting (as they say in Bree). If it had been Greasy who was the antichrist, if they'd been polite enough or even frigid and gone about their day, if it hadn't been Adam who'd been charming and considerate and been invited in. Because something really quite dangerous happens that afternoon beyond Anathema being comforted (to a point): Adam's not only educated a bit about things like the dangers of nuclear power and the lack of space ships in such facilities *g*, his imagination is also awakened a bit.

An eleven-year-old boy playing inquisitor the same way he might play pirate, dunking his friend's kid sister in the water, Monty Python-style, and asking if thyme is a sufficiently witchy herb is pretty cute. Having the actual antichrist think the Spanish Inquisition is all a game – you know, the thing that expressed such terrible feats of imagination it sent Crowley to drinking – then turn around and awaken said imagination by exposing him tl all sorts of knowledge he'd been too hemmed in by his parents' ordinariness to be aware of before?

That's just terrifying; Someone save us all.

[marta-bee]

As you might have guessed from the quotes, I’ve been reading Good Omens again. I was all prepared to be uncomfortable with this par. Crowley was about to turn paintball guns into gun-guns, and I was sure after all the mass shootings America has seen since the twelve or so years since I last read it, that part would just hit differently.

I wasn’t wrong, though I’d forgotten how funny and delightfully ‘90s-ish the corporate warfare was. Honestly I was laughing too hard at all the humor around the violence to notice. I can’t recommend it enough, if you’re old enough to remember why Dilbert was funny once upon a time, you really should give this bit a read. A sample:

The contingent from Financial Planning were lying flat on their faces in what had once been the haha, although they weren't very amused.

"I always said you couldn't trust those people from Purchasing," said the Deputy Financial Manager. "The bastards."

A shot pinged off the wall above him.

He crawled hurriedly over to the little group clustered around the fallen Wethered. "How does it look?" he said.

The assistant Head of Wages turned a haggard face toward him.

"Pretty bad," he said. "The bullet went through nearly all of them. Access, Barclaycard, Diners-the lot."

"It was only the American Express Gold that stopped it," said Wethered.

They looked in mute horror at the spectacle of a credit card wallet with a bullet hole nearly all the way through it.

"Why'd they do it?" said a wages officer.

What most struck me though was the bits woven between all the poking fun at white collar office culture and the human capacity to wish violence on each other. I’d almost call it a coincidence if it wasn’t actually relevant to everything else going on. Any of my fellow Sherlockians, you know what they say about coincidences.

Let’s start with Nigel Tompkins. Or a little before he shows up, for context. Aziraphale and Crowley are hunting for the antichrist so decide to go back to the hospital where Crowley left him. It’s been burned down, most of the sisters have left, but now Sr. Mary Loquacious (now Mary Hodges, no sister) has turned it into a rather unorthodox corporate events center. They’re doing paintball. Lots of stultified corporate types have been handed nonlethal guns and told to have at it, which has exactly the result you’d expect (humans being humans) even before Crowley miracles their dearest wishes into reality and turns their paintball guns into real guns.

This is the scene Az&Cr stumble into (the paintball version to start). Nigel Tompkins has the bad luck to shoot at them as they’re getting out of the car, and after much hemming and hawing over stained fabrics, Crowley scares him off:

Tompkins thumbed another paint pellet into the gun and muttered business mantras to himself. Do Unto Others Before They Do Unto You. Kill or Be Killed. Either Shit or Get Out of the Kitchen. Survival of the Fittest. Make My Day.

He crawled a little nearer to the figures by the statue. They didn't seem to have noticed him. When the available cover ran out, he took a deep breath and leapt to his feet.

"Okay, douchebags, grab some sk-ohnoooeeeeee . . ."

Where one of the figures had been there was something dreadful. He blacked out. Crowley restored himself to his favorite shape.

"I hate having to do that," he murmured. "I'm always afraid I'll forget how to change back. And it can ruin a good suit."

"I think the maggots were a bit over the top, myself," said Aziraphale, but without much rancor.

Then later:

Nigel Tompkins had come to with a mild headache and a vaguely empty space in his recent memory. He was not to know that the human brain, when faced with a sight too terrible to contemplate, is remarkably good at scabbing it over with forced forgetfulness, so he put it down to a pellet strike on the head.

He was vaguely aware that his gun was somewhat heavier, but in his mildly bemused state he did not realize why until some time after he'd pointed it at trainee manager Norman Wethered from Internal Audit and pulled the trigger.

It’s this “scabbed over” language that really interests me, because ti comes up again with Mary Hodges. Trying to get information out of her, Crowley puts her into a kind of trance to question her.

"Good"-Crowley glanced at his watch-"morning, ma'am," he said, in a sing-song voice. "We're just a couple of supernatural entities and we were just wondering if you might help us with the whereabouts of the notorious Son of Satan." He smiled coldly at the angel. "I'll wake her up again, shall I? And you can say it."

"Well. Since you put it like that . . ." said the angel slowly.

"Sometimes the old ways are best," said Crowley. He turned to the impassive woman. "Were you a nun here eleven years ago?" he said.

"Yes," said Mary.

"There!" said Crowley to Aziraphale. "See? I knew I wasn't wrong." "Luck of the devil," muttered the angel.

"Your name then was Sister Talkative. Or something." "Loquacious," said Mary Hodges in a hollow voice.

"And do you recall an incident involving the switching of newborn babies?" said Crowley.

Mary Hodges hesitated. When she did speak, it was as though memories that had been scabbed over were being disturbed for the first time in years.

"Yes," she said.

"Is there any possibility that the switch could have gone wrong in some way?" "I do not know."

Crowley thought for a bit. "You must have had records," he said. "There are always records.

Everyone has records these days." He glanced proudly at Aziraphale. "It was one of my better ideas." "Oh, yes," said Mary Hodges.

"And where are they?" said Aziraphale sweetly.

"There was a fire just after the birth."

Crowley groaned and threw his hands in the air. "That was Hastur, probably," he said. "It's his style. Can you believe those guys? I bet he thought he was being really clever." "Do you recall any details about the other child?" said Aziraphale. "Yes."

"Please tell me."

"He had lovely little toesie-wosies."

Neil and PTerry are not authors like me, they don’t just use the same word all helter-skelter because they cant remember what they wrote five lines earlier. They’re funny and most importantly clever people. Or at least they have good editors who will call them on it. So likening this hazy or lost memory to a scab seems intentional to me.

But it’s not that Mary was traumatized by her time with the order. She was young and a bit hemmed in, but they weren’t evil in anything more than being allied with Crowley’s side. There’s nothing about her time with them that would be particularly upsetting, certainly not so much she’d have blocked it out even from her subconscious. Crowley’s putting her under here feels vaguely akin to hypnosis, suppressing part of her mental defenses so she’ll share more information with less filtering. And even then, talking about that time brings on the same sensation Nigel had when exposed to something too scary and --more importantly-- weird to fit with how he normally saw the world.

I think it’s Crowley. Specifically, Crowley letting his human face slip a bit. With Nigel it was intentional, with the nuns, possibly because Crowley was more distressed than he normally was so was less in control of himself? He wasn’t transforming into things that go bump in the night, sure, but between being so upset about the Apocalypse happening and these being his people so he didn’t have to fight so hard to hide his essence, I wonder if he didn’t let a certain something just ... slip through? Something the human mind just isn’t equipped to deal with?

It calls to mind another scene where we talked about memory and the benefit of failing to leave an impression, from much earlier:

"Is that him?" said Sister Mary, staring at the baby. "Only I'd expected funny eyes. Red, or green. Or teensy-weensy little hoofikins. Or a widdle tail." She turned him around as she spoke. No horns either. The Devil's child looked ominously normal.

"Yes, that's him," said Crowley.

"Fancy me holding the Antichrist," said Sister Mary. "And bathing the Antichrist. And counting his little toesy-wosies . . ."

She was now addressing the child directly, lost in some world of her own. Crowley waved a hand in front of her wimple. "Hallo? Hallo? Sister Mary?"

"Sorry, sir. He is a little sweetheart, though. Does he look like his daddy? I bet he does. Does he look like his daddywaddykins . . ."

"No," said Crowley firmly. "And now I should get up to the delivery rooms, if I were you."

"Will he remember me when he grows up, do you think?" said Sister Mary wistfully, sidling slowly down the corridor.

"Pray that he doesn't," said Crowley, and fled.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but maybe it’s not Crowley, or just Crowley, that makes her memories of this event feel scabbed-over. “Lost in some world of her own” could just be getting a little absorbed in the new baby (lots of women particularly are conditioned to think we need to coo over infants, and I can��t imagine the type of women who become nuns-- satanic or otherwise-- are much different in that respect). But it doesn’t have to be just that, does it? Prolonged exposure to the supernatural, even the also-human antichrist in his veiled form, seems like the kind of thing that’s too weird for the human psyche to easily come to terms with.

It’s interesting, because that sort of inability to be noticed is really biting Crowley in the backside now.

"Of course, we might be able to get a human to find him," said Aziraphale thoughtfully. "What?" said Crowley, distractedly.

"Humans are good at finding other humans. They've been doing it for thousands of years. And the child is human. As well as . . . you know. He would be hidden from us, but other humans might be able to . . . oh, sense him, perhaps. Or spot things we wouldn't think of."

"It wouldn't work. He's the Antichrist! He's got this . . . sort of automatic defense, hasn't he? Even if he doesn't know it. It won't even let people suspect him. Not yet. Not till it's ready. Suspicion will slide off him like, like . . . whatever it is water slides off of," he finished lamely.

"Got any better ideas? Got one single better idea?" said Aziraphale.

"No."

I’m not saying this has to be the same sort of inability-to-be-perceived that affected Mary and Nigel above. It could be a sort of built-in defense mechanism specially for the antichrist. But it seems on theme at the very least. There seems something deeply sad to me, and probably very relevant to the queer experience of the ‘80s and ‘90s, around the time this book was written and published, to there being something about your true nature that’s just not allowed to be seen and remembered.

Now I’ve made myself a bit sad, and if you’ve read this long you deserve to end on a treat. Luckily, our favorite authors have us covered there as well.

"Ducks!" he shouted.

"What?"

"That's what water slides off!" Aziraphale took a deep breath.

"Just drive the car, please," he said wearily.

They drove back through the dawn, while the cassette player played J. S. Bach's Mass in B Minor, vocals by F. Mercury.

[marta-bee]

I've been fixating a bit (okay, more than a bit) on Agnes Nutter, to the point it's keeping me from pressing on with my reread. I'm just ... sitting here thinking about her, and reveling in the delicious parallels going on with her and Crowley. Or rather, with what I thought was a parallel, and is actually a pretty big difference, but is no less interesting for that fact.

Per usual, let's start with the text. Also per usual, it's a bit long and worth sharing in its entirety if only because the wry sense of humor makes me smile, so under the readmore it goes.

The English, by and large, being a crass and indolent race, were not as keen on burning women as other countries in Europe. In Germany the bonfires were built and burned with regular Teutonic thoroughness. Even the pious Scots, locked throughout history in a long-drawn-out battle with their arch-enemies the Scots, managed a few burnings to while away the long winter evenings. But the English never seemed to have the heart for it. One reason for this may have to do with the manner of Agnes Nutter's death, which more or less marked the end of the serious witchhunting craze in England. A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent and curing people, arrived at her house one April evening to find her sitting with her coat on, waiting for them. "Ye're tardie," she said to them. "I shoulde have beene aflame ten minutes since." Then she got up and hobbled slowly through the suddenly silent crowd, out of the cottage, and to the bonfire that had been hastily thrown together on the village green. Legend says that she climbed awkwardly onto the pyre and thrust her arms around the stake behind her. "Tye yt well," she said to the astonished witchfinder. And then, as the villagers sidled toward the pyre, she raised her handsome head in the firelight and said, "Gather ye ryte close, goode people. Come close untyl the fire near scorch ye, for I charge ye that alle must see how thee last true wytch in England dies. For wytch I am, for soe I am judged, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be. And therefore let myne deathe be a messuage to the worlde. Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do none understande." And, apparently, she smiled and looked up at the sky over the village and added, "That goes for you as welle, yowe daft old foole." And after that strange blasphemy she said no more. She let them gag her, and stood imperiously as the torches were put to the dry wood. The crowd grew nearer, one or two of its members a little uncertain as to whether they'd done the right thing, now they came to think about it. Thirty seconds later an explosion took out the village green, scythed the valley clean of every living thing, and was seen as far away as Halifax. There was much subsequent debate as to whether this had been sent by God or by Satan, but a note later found in Agnes Nutter's cottage indicated that any divine or devilish intervention had been materially helped by the contents of Agnes's petticoats, wherein she had with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails. What Agnes also left behind, on the kitchen table beside a note cancelling the milk, was a box and a book. There were specific instructions as to what should be done with the box, and equally specific instructions about what should be done with the book; it was to be sent to Agnes's son, John Device. The people who found it-who were from the next village, and had been woken up by the explosion-considered ignoring the instructions and just burning the cottage, and then looked around at the twinkling fires and nail-studded wreckage and decided not to. Besides, Agnes's note included painfully precise predictions about what would happen to people who did not carry out her orders. The man who put the torch to Agnes Nutter was a Witchfinder Major. They found his hat in a tree two miles away.

I mentioned before how fascinated I was by Agnes just accepting the witchy label: "For wytch I am, for soe I am judged, yette I knoe not what my true Cryme may be." Anathema seems more like a witch in a more real sense; Agnes is someone who just somehow knows things and tries to use that to help her neighbors. And its not beyond the pale she would have known about what caused disease and helped her neighbors live more healthy lives. (A sort of proto-germ theory was written about in European medical circles by at least the 1300s, and in the Islamic world before that; though it wasn't mainstream science and certainly not well-known outside more academic circles.) How someone with Agnes's background would have learned about it is a much bigger stretch. And yes, it's absolutely plausible that her knowing that stuff and it actually working would seem like witchcraft to her neighbors. But if she was well-read, independently minded, or just stumbled on the right book somehow, certainly not impossible she could have known.

Of course, Good Omens isn't historical fiction, and I suspect Agnes knows because the plot demands it. ""A howling mob, reduced to utter fury by her habit of going around being intelligent"? Especially when the her is, well, a her? Sadly, that's hardly beyond the pale either, historically speaking.

What's fascinating is Agnes seems to blame the people around her, or at least hold them responsible, for not knowing things I really don't see why they should have known. Germ theory is one thing. It's a stretch that a bunch of 16th-century (or whenever exactly this is) provincials would be up on Ibn Sina's or Fracastoro's theories, and the real problem is them giving in to fear at their lack of control when she knows something they didn't. Couldn't have known, even, at least not practically.

That's even more the case with her death. I'm not saying it's not justified: they're trying to kill her, completely unjustifiably. But she doesn't say she's killing them in revenge for killing her, or in self-defense; rather: "Gather ye ryte close, I saye, and marke well the fate of alle who meddle with suche as theye do none understande." They're dead because they didn't understand what they were working with?

Which, to be clear, was not a vengeful God or Satan, but a woman who'd "with some foresight concealed eighty pounds of gunpowder and forty pounds of roofing nails" in her petticoats. And I suppose, yes, if someone had checked her garments for combustibles it's the kind of thing they could have found and a veteran of some sort could have recognized the danger there. But who would really think to look? Again: it's knowable in a technical sense. The knowledge is out there. But practically speaking, do we really hold them accountable for that.

Which brings me to Crowley. When I started this I was remembering some exchanges from the show about Crowley's driving, specifically:

Aziraphale: So we only have to find the birth records. Go through the hospital files. Crowley: And then what? A: And then we find the child. C: And then what? A: Watch out for that pedestrian. C: She's on the street. She knows the risk she's taking. A: Just watch the-- watch the road. Wh - where is this hospital, anyway? C: A village near Oxford, Tadfield. A: Crowley, you can't do 90 miles per hour in Central London. C: Why not? A: You'll get us killed. Well, inconveniently discorporated. (pause) Music. Why don't I put on a little... music?

Which isn't actually quite the way it happens in the book.

"I suppose - get off the road you clown - your people wouldn't consider--and the scooter you rode in on!-giving me asylum?" "I was going to ask you the same thing - Watch out for that pedestrian!" "It's on the street, it knows the risks it's taking!" said Crowley, easing the accelerating car between a parked car and a taxi and leaving a space which would have barely accepted even the best credit card. "Watch the road! Watch the road! Where is this hospital, anyway?" "Somewhere south of Oxford!" Aziraphale grabbed the dashboard. "You can't do ninety miles an hour in Central London!" Crowley peered at the dial. "Why not?" he said. "You'll get us killed!" Aziraphale hesitated. "Inconveniently discorporated," he corrected, lamely, relaxing a little. "Anyway, you might kill other people." Crowley shrugged. The angel had never really come to grips with the twentieth century, and didn't realize that it is perfectly possible to do ninety miles an hour down Oxford Street. You just arranged matters so that no one was in the way. And since everyone knew that it was impossible to do ninety miles an hour down Oxford Street, no one noticed.

So Crowley's not actually saying if he plows over a pedestrian speeding through London it's the pedestrian's fault in the books, though the show's dialogue can fairly be read that way. He knows he can miracle things so no one gets hurt, meaning there's nothing really to worry about. He's stressed over the whole missing antichrist thing, he's driven to distraction, and he indulges in a little bit of road rage as a treat.

But he's not really saying it would be the pedestrian's fault. Because while it's technically possible someone would be speeding through London and pedestrians should be aware of it, practically? Well, I've spent the last decade as a non-driver in another major cities. And on inner-city streets? You just don't expect cars to come barrelling down on you at those speeds. Because pedestrians are common and there's too much traffic for cars to go at those speeds. Technically it's a possibility you could get hit by a car speeding through (it happens), but it's not like you'd be negligent to think any car on the street would come slow enough you could see it and react.

Crowley seems to agree, and is only so lax about his criticism ("They know the risks!") because he also knows he can manage things so it just will never happen. But I doubt Agnes would be so generous.

I think that's what's so frustrating and fascinating to me about Agnes, in equal measure. She just sort of knows by fate or divine writ or whatever; and she holds everyone else to the same standard. If they'd searched her they could have known she'd essentially strapped herself with a bomb and shrapnel, so if they want to go and get themselves blown up that's their affair. Never mind that no one would think to search her. It's a fact, it's out there to be known, and that's enough.

Whereas Crowley at least is willing to introduce a bit of understanding into his thinking, and understands that just because something is technically discoverable doesn't mean everyone actually has the wherewithal to do said discovering. It reminds me of that conversation about free will I discussed a while back:

Aziraphale had tried to explain it to him once. The whole point, he'd said-this was somewhere around 1020, when they'd first reached their little Arrangement-the whole point was that when a human was good or bad it was because they wanted to be. Whereas people like Crowley and, of course, himself, were set in their ways right from the start. People couldn't become truly holy, he said, unless they also had the opportunity to be definitively wicked. Crowley had thought about this for some time and, around about 1023, had said, Hang on, that only works, right, if you start everyone off equal, okay? You can't start someone off in a muddy shack in the middle of a war zone and expect them to do as well as someone born in a -castle. Ah, Aziraphale had said, that's the good bit. The lower you start, the more opportunities you have. Crowley had said, That's lunatic. No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

I guess --for me at least-- it makes Agnes's foresight seem a bit like God's omniscience. It makes sense but also isn't a compliment. Objectivity can be blinding in its way, and while Agnes may know, I don't think it can be truthfully said that she's doing much seeing here.

[marta-bee]

I’m continuing on with my Good Omens (re-)read, and let me tell you, as fun as the miniseries version of the handing over of the baby antichrist was, it’s got nothing on the written page. The showrunners did the best they could, of course, but the medium only allows for a certain amount of the .. attitude, between Crowley and Hastur. This is a bit long, but to cut any of it seems like sacrilege. Or -lege against somebody, at any rate.

"Hi," said Crowley, giving them a little wave. "Sorry I'm late, but you know how it is on the A40 at Denham, and then I tried to cut up towards Chorley Wood and then-"

"Now we art all here," said Hastur meaningfully, "we must recount the Deeds of the Day." "Yeah. Deeds," said Crowley, with the slightly guilty look of one who is attending church for the first time in years and has forgotten which bits you stand up for.

Hastur cleared his throat.

"I have tempted a priest," he said. "As he walked down the street and saw the pretty girls in the sun, I put Doubt into his mind. He would have been a saint, but within a decade we shall have him."

"Nice one," said Crowley, helpfully.

"I have corrupted a politician," said Ligur. "I let him think a tiny bribe would not hurt. Within a year we shall have him."

They both looked expectantly at Crowley, who gave them a big smile. "You'll like this," he said.

His smile became even wider and more conspiratorial.

"I tied up every portable telephone system in Central London for forty-five minutes at lunchtime," he said.

There was silence, except for the distant swishing of cars. "Yes?" said Hastur. "And then what?"

"Look, it wasn't easy," said Crowley. "That's all?" said Ligur.

"Look, people – "

"And exactly what has that done to secure souls for our master?" said Hastur. Crowley pulled himself together.

What could he tell them? That twenty thousand people got bloody furious? That you could hear the arteries clanging shut all across the city? And that then they went back and took it out on their secretaries or traffic wardens or whatever, and they took it out on other people? In all kinds of vindictive little ways which, and here was the good bit, they thought up themselves. For the rest of the day. The pass-along effects were incalculable. Thousands and thousands of souls all got a faint patina of tarnish, and you hardly had to lift a finger.

But you couldn't tell that to demons like Hastur and Ligur. Fourteenth-century minds, the lot of them. Spending years picking away at one soul. Admittedly it was craftsmanship, but you had to think differently these days. Not big, but wide. With five billion people in the world you couldn't pick the buggers off one by one any more; you had to spread your effort. But demons like Ligur and Hastur wouldn't understand. They'd never have thought up Welsh-language television, for example. Or value-added tax. Or Manchester.

He'd been particularly pleased with Manchester.

"The Powers that Be seem to be satisfied," he said. "Times are changing. So what's up?" Hastur reached down behind a tombstone.

"This is," he said.

Crowley stared at the basket. "Oh," he said. "No."

"Yes," said Hastur, grinning.

"Already?"

"Yes."

"And, er, it's up to me to-?" "Yes." Hastur was enjoying this.

"Why me?" said Crowley desperately. "You know me, Hastur, this isn't, you know, my scene ..." "Oh, it is, it is," said Hastur. "Your scene. Your starring role. Take it. Times are changing." "Yeah," said Ligur, grinning. "They're coming to an end, for a start."

"Why me?"

"You are obviously highly favored," said Hastur maliciously. "I imagine Ligur here would give his right arm for a chance like this."

"That's right," said Ligur. Someone's right arm, anyway, he thought. There were plenty of right arms around; no sense in wasting a good one.

Hastur produced a clipboard from the grubby recesses of his mack. "Sign. Here," he said, leaving a terrible pause between the words.

Crowley fumbled vaguely in an inside pocket and produced a pen. It was sleek and matte black. It looked as though it could exceed the speed limit.

"S'nice pen," said Ligur.

"It can write under water," Crowley muttered. "Whatever will they think of next?" mused Ligur.

"Whatever it is, they'd better think of it quickly," said Hastur. "No. Not A. J. Crowley. Your real name."

Crowley nodded mournfully and drew a complex, wiggly sign on the page. It glowed red in the gloom, just for a moment, and then faded.

"What am I supposed to do with it?" he said.

"You will receive instructions." Hastur scowled. "Why so worried, Crowley? The moment we have been working for all these centuries is at hands"

"Yeah. Right," said Crowley. He did not look, now, like the lithe figure that had sprung so lithely from the Bentley a few minutes ago. He had a hunted expression.

The bare bones are definitely there in the show, but there’s something particularly genius of about the way the different tones and attitudes are captured in the thoughts and voice-tags. It just kind of slides right into every available inch of the scene. The contempt, the characterization (flash bastard vs. fourteenth-century minds, etc.) It’s almost passive-aggressive in a way. But it definitely packs a punch.

The little grace notes, the barely-mentioned deeds like Manchester (why is it so fun to make jokes about northern cities in British media? I had the exact same giggle-fit to Doctor Who’s poking fun at Cardiff....), but most of all the glimpse we get into what makes Crowley work. He’s not actually a bad demon, in many ways he’s a very good demon for the modern times, very effective, but also rebelling against pretty much else, including other demons and even the concept of what it means to be demonic. Flash bastard, indeed.

I do believe I’m in love.

[marta-bee]

Good Omens time! (Isn’t it always?) Today I read the start of the “Friday” section, when Famine gets his object of the Apocalypse, his brass scale to match War’s flaming sword. It’s a cute scene anyone who’s worked in fast-food or a customer-facing job like retail will probably appreciate. Or for that matter anyone who’s actually stepped foot in a McDonald’s; which is, you know, all of us.

Sable sauntered in to the Burger Lord. It was exactly like every other Burger Lord in America. [But not like every other Burger Lord across the world. German Burger Lords, for example, sold lager instead of root beer, while English Burger Lords managed to take any American fast food virtues (the speed with which your food was delivered, for example) and carefully remove them; your food arrived after half an hour, at room temperature, and it was only because of the strip of warm lettuce between them that you could distinguish the burger from the bun. The Burger Lord pathfinder salesmen had been shot twenty-five minutes after setting foot in France.] McLordy the Clown danced in the Kiddie Korner. The serving staff had identical gleaming smiles that never reached their eyes. And behind the counter a chubby, middle-aged man in a Burger Lord uniform, slapped burgers onto the griddle, whistling softly, happy in his work.

Sable went up to the counter.

"Hello-my-name-is-Marie," said the girl behind the counter. "How-can-i-help-you?" "A double blaster thunder biggun, extra fries, hold the mustard," he said.

"Anything-to-drink?"

"A special thick whippy chocobanana shake."

She pressed the little pictogram squares on her till. (Literacy was no longer a requirement for employment in these restaurants. Smiling was.) Then she turned to the chubby man behind the counter.

"DBTB, E F, hold mustard," she said. "Choco-shake."

"Uhhnhuhn," crooned the cook. He sorted the food into little paper containers, pausing only to brush the graying cowlick from his eyes.

"Here y'are," he said.

She took them without looking at him, and he returned cheerfully to his griddle, singing quietly. "Loooove me tender, loooove me long, neeeever let me go...."

The man's humming, Sable noted, clashed with the Burger Lord background music, a tinny tape loop of the Burger Lord commercial jingle, and he made a mental note to have him fired.

It’s so predictable; so dehumanizing. Intelligence and even basic education to the point of literacy isn’t needed; bland mechanization and the ability to not stand out is.

Famine actually owns the joint, not to make money (though the end result is pretty much indistinguishable from chains with that goal) but to get people who aren’t diet-crazed and faddish enough to willingly give up nutrition to to be thin. This is his unique brand of starvation brought to the masses.

The Newtrition corporation had started small, eleven years ago. A small team of food scientists, a huge team of marketing and public relations personnel, and a neat logo.

Two years of Newtrition investment and research had produced CHOW. CHOW contained spun, plaited, and woven protein molecules, capped and coded, carefully designed to be ignored by even the most ravenous digestive tract enzymes; no-cal sweeteners; mineral oils replacing vegetable oils; fibrous materials, colorings, and flavorings. The end result was a foodstuff almost indistinguishable from any other except for two things. Firstly, the price, which was slightly higher, and secondly the nutritional content, which was roughly equivalent to that of a Sony Walkman. It didn't matter how much you ate, you lost weight. [And Hair. And skin tone. And, if you ate enough of it long enough, vital signs.]

Fat people had bought it. Thin people who didn't want to get fat had bought it. Chow was the ultimate diet food-carefully spun, woven, textured, and pounded to imitate anything, from potatoes to venison, although the chicken sold best.

Sable sat back and watched the money roll in. He watched CHOW gradually fill the ecological niche that used to be filled by the old, untrademarked food.

He followed Chows with Snacks junk food made from real junk. MEALS was Sable's latest brainwave.

MEALS was CHOW) with added sugar and fat. The theory was that if you ate enough MEALS you would a) get very fat, and b) die of malnutrition.

The paradox delighted Sable.

There’s something very gently sad about all of this, really. People buying this mass-produced slop and not realizing what they’re putting in their body is quite literally useless. It’s non-food; anti-food, even. I don’t blame the people making that “choice,” they’re certainly no more or less deceived than the folks stopping into a KFC down the road. It’s just very ad that this is what the system drives us to. Now even more than twenty-odd years ago.

This started out as a cute scene about the banality of being trapped under the thumb of capitalism. It is that to be sure, but a little too near the truth to be laughed off, at least for me. Famine isn’t a starving child in Africa with his ribs protruding out from his skin, or at least it’s not just them. It’s the workaday person being ground down into just a cog in the machine, and whose real value is an ability not to stand out.

That’s tragic in its way, and all too true to life. It’s not just a truth for low-wage workers; I’m a definite white-collar middle-class knowledge-worker and thinking about how much of my own employability relies on something rather similar, though the privileges and benefits I get through my own ability to work in the system do make for a much more comfortable life.

I think I need to stop here and sit with this a bit. Definitely whichever one of Neil or Terry wrote this particular scene, they knocked it out of the park. There’s more with the Them coming up I see, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Aziraphale and Crowley were waiting in the offing a well, but they can wait until next weekend.

[marta-bee]

Current thinking favors them. They lend weight to the moral argument.

I mean, I knew the line was coming. Anticipated it, even. Still, here I am, howling away.

[marta-bee]

New Year's resolutions and all, I read a bit more of Good Omens this weekend and tonight. Adam is coming into his anti-christly self in a way that's almost scarily still relevant. We learn a bit more about Agnes. Lots more minor characters to love (Jaime Hernandez's lovely just-do-something attitude in particular!), and the poor Them!

The trouble is, now I have to write about it properly. Making matters worse, a favorite philosophy journal just posted a volume focusing on the free will problem, which made quite a bit about Agnes resonate in a big way. I have many thoughts, and while I'm not sure how nice and accurate any of them truly are, they still are clamoring to be said. And really, I'm just too tired to wrestle them all into coherence these days.

Still, I'm reading and thinking and enjoying it all. That seems like the necessary first step toward having something to share. And who knows, maybe I'll catch a second wind in the next day or so.

[marta-bee]

Pressing on with rereading Good Omens. I'm a little tired so didn't get particularly far, but I'm really enjoying the digs at things Americans supposedly don't know about the British. Take this footnote about firelighters:

Note for Americans and other city-dwelling life-forms: the rural British, having eschewed central heating as being far too complicated and in any case weakening moral fiber, prefer a system of piling small pieces of wood and lumps of coal, topped by large, wet logs, possibly made of asbestos, into small, smoldering heaps, known as "There's nothing like a roaring open fire is there?" Since none of these ingredients are naturally inclined to burn, underneath all this the apply a small, rectangular, waxy white lump, which burns cheerfully until the weight of the fire puts it out. These little white blocks are called firelighters. No one knows why.

As if America wasn't filled to the brim with all sorts of wilderness our fathers and uncles and all sorts insisted on dragging us to on every long weekend so we can alternately shoot, fish, or all but roll about in poison ivy. That was the typical American experience, wasn't it? Or was it just me?

This American at least had no shortage of campfires in her formative years. Though the bit about comfort softening moral fiber does seem particularly British, at least if the British boarding school novels I read a few of in middle school are any indication.

Or take this aside:

NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shelling = Five Pee.

Ah, yes. That's helpful. Pressing on....

It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system. Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thruenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A SixPence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and One Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea. The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.

I do have some sympathy, having spent a lot of time in Germany pre-Euro and travelling semi-regularly to France, Switzerland, and Italy. Good lord, what a difference a common currency made when it came around. I understand nostalgia and all that but how anyone could have had a preference for the old way baffles the mind.

I personally like to imagine this is more PTerry taking the piss out of Neil or quite possibly the other way around, and I quite like not being 100% sure who's making fun of whom. It's a very writerly thing to do, frankly.

*************

.... And, it looks like we're finally going to get the Agnes Nutter scene which should be a lot of fun in written form. But for some reason I thought it would be a smart idea to start a demanding new job and pull off an inter-state move at the same time. I'm surviving and even coming to like parts of it as I get more and more under my belt, but I'm also exhausted, so the Witchfinder Army's greatest defeat will have to wait. My brain is soup and demands a bit of a rest.

[marta-bee]

Pressing on with the great Good Omens reading, I am quite in love with our favorite deliveryman's doing his duty by Death:

He was halfway across when a German juggernaut came around the corner, its driver crazed on caffeine, little white pills, and EEC transport regulations. He watched its receding bulk. Cor, he thought, that one nearly had me. Then he looked down at the gutters. Oh, he thought. YES, agreed a voice from behind his left shoulder, or at least from behind the memory of his left shoulder. The delivery man turned, and looked, and saw. At first he couldn't find the words, couldn't find anything, and then the habits of a working lifetime took over and he said, "Message for you, sir." FOR ME? "Yes, sir." He wished he still had a throat. He could have swallowed, if he still had a throat. "No package, I'm afraid, Mister... uh, sir. It's a message." DELIVER IT, THEN. "It's this, sir. Ahem. Come and see." FINALLY. There was a grin on its face, but then, given the face, there couldn't have been anything else. THANK YOU, it continued. I MUST COMMEND YOUR DEVOTION TO DUTY. "Sir?" The late delivery man was falling through a gray mist, and all he could see were two spots of blue, that might have been eyes, and might been distant stars. DON'T THINK OF IT AS DYING, said Death, JUST THINK OF IT AS LEAVING EARLY TO AVOID THE RUSH. The delivery man had a brief moment to wonder whether his new companion was making a joke, and to decide that he wasn't; and then there was nothing.

There's something delightfully macabre about this whole scene but so mundane at the same time. It's understated. It's full of a certainty that this is just how things are. And it lends such an understated but inarguable power to Death here, a finality that fits quite well.

As for the deliveryman it presents him as so thoroughly non-special, it really packs a punch because this could be any one o us. He seems like a hobbit. Not one of the heroes but just one of those doing their best in the midst of it all; a Fatty Bolger or a Lobelia Sackville-Baggins, perhaps.

Plus, it's funny. It's just hilarious and twisting-a-knife-in-the-gut oofiness all at the same time.

*************

Using a slightly different part of my brain, I'm intrigued by the description of Pestilence Pollution. The character is literally Mr. White (here, Chalk), and while I guess his race was never spelled out, assumptions defaulting as they do, I always thought he was meant to be racially white as well. The show gives us a brilliant nonbinary version of the character, but also one played by an Asian (specifically Filipino) actress.

Which is interesting, for a start. because of the politics around pollution and global warming and the role Asian countries like China becoming more developed contribute to that. In reality Western countries are responsible for so much more, but connecting pollution with an Asian face seems to tap into something slightly uncomfortable, at least for me.

To be clear, I doubt it was intentional, and Lourdes was so brilliant in the role, I can't really imagine anyone else doing so well. But seeing a character my brain insists on imagining as a white man, probably a middle-aged white man in a suit, definitely hits differently.

*************

Finally, I'd be remiss if I didn't point out the River Uck is an actual place, and if Wikipedia can be believed its signs are subject to exactly the kind of vandalism one would hope. But even without that, what a glorious place-name for this scene. I like imagining Neill and Terry giggling over it back in the day, or at least smiling gently at the world's neverending absurdities.

*************

That's all I've got time for this weekend, reading-wise, unfortunately. It is nice to get my readerly toes wet again, though.