What do you think is the definining moment for the main character/person in your book? Why?

G00d Omens doesn't really have one main character, but for the purposes of this blog I will pick Adam, the Antichrist, to be our protagonist. His defining moment is easily spotted. It happens at the end of the book, and also the end of the world. He is speaking to his gang of children, the Them, about what will happen after the Rapture. At this moment his destiny is overtaking his personality, and he doesn't really know what is coming over him. He has a plan to rebuild the world after the Apocalypse, since all of the grown ups have messed everything up. He plans to give each of his friends a corner of the world, while he himself just wants Tadfield, the small village they live in.

"'But I'll have Tadfield,' said Adam.

They stared at him.

'An', an' Lower Tadfield, and Norton, and Norton Woods--'

They still stared.

Adam's gaze dragged itself across their faces.

'They're all I've ever wanted,' he said.

They shook their heads.

'I can have 'em if I want,' said Adam, his voice tinged with sullen defiance and his defiance edged with sudden doubt. 'I can make them better, too. Better trees to climb, better ponds, better . . .'

He stopped, his ears listening in horror to the words his mouth was speaking. THe Them were backing away.

Dog put his paws over his head.

Adam's face looked like an impersonation of the collapse of empire.

'No,' he said hoarsely. 'No. Come back! I command you!'

They froze in mid-dash. . . .

Adam opened his mouth and screamed. It was a sound that a merely mortal throat should not have been able to utter; it wound out of the quarry, mingled with the storm, caused the clouds to curdle into new and unpleasant shapes. . . .

It spoke of loss, and it did not stop for a very long time.

And then it did.

Something drained away.

Adam's head tilted down again. His eyes opened.

Whatever had been standing in the old quarry before, Adam Young was standing there now. A more knowledgeable Adam Young, but Adam Young nevertheless. Possibly more of Adam Young than there had ever been before. . . . 'It's all right,' said Adam quietly. 'Pepper? Wensley? Brian? Come back here. It's all right. It's all right. I know everything now. And you've got to help me. Otherwise it's all goin' to happen. It's really all goin' to happen. It's all goin' to happen, if we don't do somethin'.'"

I might be completely misinterpreting this passage, but I think that Adam overcomes his fate. Since his birth he was destined to bring about Armageddon, and now he realizes that that isn't who he wants to be, so he has to be stronger than himself in order to do what is right and good and not what he was meant to do.

How did the opening passage of the book (first paragraph up to first chapter) lead you to anticipate the tone of the book?

The first passage of Good Omens is as follows:

"It was a nice day.

All the days had been nice. There had been rather more than seven of them so far, and rain hadn't been invented yet. But clouds massing east of Eden suggested that the first thunderstorm was on its way, and it was going to be a big one."

This passage gives the setting, Eden, and lets us know that the book will have some sort of religious theme to it. However, it doesn't take itself seriously. This isn't a deep philosophical book, it's philosophical, and occasionally has lapses of depth, but always under the facade of a humorous book. It actually is hilarious. This first paragraph, even the first two sentences, set the hilarious tone for the rest of the book. "It was a nice day. All the days had been nice." Of course all the days had been nice; they're in Eden. I don't know what the term for this voice or tone is, but in my head Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are saying "Duh" in more eloquent ways and that is their tone. They have this sort of dry humor throughout, and its hilarious. I was able to predict their tone after reading this very first passage. I love the use of the word "invented" instead of, say, "created." Invention is a scientific process, and I love the irony of using it to describe Creation. It makes me giggle.

What passage(s) do you particularly like in the book? (Copy parts of them in your journal and then write your answer to these questions) Why?

When Crowley thought that Adam was the Antichrist, he sent him a satanical hellhound suitable for 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." However, Adam wasn't nearly as evil as Crowley and the rest of the underworld had hoped, and while Adam was supposed to name his pet something ominous like Killer, he instead named him Dog, a name suitable for a dog. And instead of being huge, black, and bloodthirsty, Dog was small, scruffy, and had one crooked ear, as Adam wished. The following passage is about Dog's slide from satanical hellhound to beloved family pet.

"Dog slouched along dutifully behind his Master. This wasn't, insofar as the hell-hound had any expectations, what he had imagined life would be like in the last days before Armageddon, but despite himself he was beginning to enjoy it....

Form shapes nature. There are certain ways of behavior appropriate to small scruffy dogs which are in fact welded into the genes. You can't just become small-dog-shaped and hope to stay the same person; a certain intrinsic small-dogness begins to permeate your very Being.

He'd already chased a rat. It had been the most enjoyable experience of his life....

And then there were cats, thought Dog. He'd surprised the huge ginger cat from next door and had attempted to reduce it to cowering jelly by means of the usual glowing stare and deep-throated growl, which had always worked on the damned in the past This time they earned him a whack on the nose that had made his eyes water. Cats, Dog considered, were clearly a lot tougher than lost souls, He was looking forward to a further cat experiment, which he'd planned would consist of jumping around and yapping excitedly at it. It was a long shot, but it might just work."

The last sentence of this passage caught me slightly off guard, then I bursted out laughing. I think it was the randomness yet predictability of it that I enjoyed so much. I wasn't expecting it, and yet everyone knows that that is what small dogs do around cats. It's just so simple.

What has author done to engage you, the reader, in a relationship with the books content?

Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman are hilarious together. They make characters that are believable, and the tone of the entire book is really funny. The conversations the characters have with each other are spoken in ways that are very easily imagined because they are so true to the way the characters have been set up to interact. Not only that, but the conversations like normal conversations that people have. I don't know if you feel the same, but I've noticed that conversations in many books are slightly different stylistically than conversations in everyday life. If interactions between people in the real world were recorded in books, they would be much different from what we have in literature. People in literature rarely ever mishear each other. There are never simple misunderstandings where Person A thinks that Person B said C, but really Person B said E, and Person A argues that Person B actually did say C, and it just goes on and on and can never be resolved. And this makes sense, its confusing to participate in these conversations, confusing to witness them, and it would be even more confusing to read about them without the benefit of body language or tone. But somehow Pratchett and Gaiman have successfully created realistic conversations between their characters that are simply hilarious and also believable.

In some books I have read, characters mush together in my head. The author's tone of voice shows through so much in their characters that the characters, instead of being their own entities, are merely different facets of the author's personality. Pratchett and Gaiman, perhaps because they are in fact two people rather than one, don't have this problem. Each character has their own specific tone of voice and personality that make their dialogue easily distinguishable from the others.

What am I reading now?

I finished My Dog Skip by Willie Morris and am now reading Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

My parents gave me this book for my birthday. I think they bought it because it has gotten very good reviews, which cover the front and back cover. It is about the Armaggedon, and Good and Evil's struggle to make sure that everything goes according to Divine Plan, which was accurately prophesied by Agnes Nutter in 1655. This book is hilarious. Aziraphale, a book-collecting angel, and Crowley, a demon who "did not so much fall as saunter vaguely downwards", while being on opposite sides of the eternal struggle between Good and Evil, admit that fighting with each other for over 10,000 years has brought them to be reluctant friends. Pratchett and Gaiman have written very believable characters and the interplay between them is a lot of fun to read. Currently, they have just realized that a plan they carried out from opposite sides eleven years ago went dreadfully wrong. "Someone seems to have misplaced the Antichrist" says the back of the book. There was a mix up at the hospital run by Satanic nuns and 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" was accidently adopted, while a harmless boy was raised by an American family while Crowley and Aziraphale sent in their Satanic tutors and holy gardeners, respectively, to raise the boy right.

What is the author's dominant method of communication--dialogue, description, narration, exposition, inclusion of others' texts--?

How does the author's method of communication affect your relationship to the subject?

Willie Morris most often uses narration as his main method of communication. He tells little anecdotes about how cute his dog is or how smart he is or how faithful. It's cute, I guess, but I wouldn't really know because he doesn't hold my attention well enough. I read about a chapter and then realize that I haven't been paying any attention to what I was reading. Normally when that happens I go back and read it again. It's usually not the book's fault, its mine for drifting off. Sometimes I even consider it a good thing on the author's part; something he or she said triggers my brain to compare it to something in my life and off it goes in some sort of nonsensical adventure; it gives relevance to what I'm reading. But My Dog Skip doesn't do this. Willie Morris fails to make the initial connection in every story he tells about Old Skip. He doesn't hook the reader. So I keep reading for the sake of reading, never once considering the profoundness of anything he says. I have grown up with dogs, so you think I'd be able to relate to him. But he simply fails to make me care about Skip.

Does the author seem to have a friendly, unfriendly, or some other type of relationship with the content of the book? Why do you think so?

I finished The Golden Compass by Phillip Pullman and am now reading My Dog Skip by Willie Morris, published 1996.



Willie Morris is most definitely, I believe, writing about his dog Skip with a very friendly and fond tone. This is a dog that he loved very much and that was a very large part of his childhood. He begins the book with the following passage: "I came across a photograph of him not long ago, his black face with the long snout sniffing at something in the air, his tail straight and pointing, his eyes flashing in some momentary excitement. Looking at a faded photograph taken more than forty years before, even as a grown man, I would admit I still missed him." This lets the reader know from the very beginning the depth of the relationship between Morris and Skip. Skip and Willie shared a lot of personal history in their time together. Skip is now long dead, and Morris most likely has made other human friends and perhaps gotten married, sharing very deep, personal relationships with other people. But the fact that he still misses Skip and recognizes the importance of their relationship says a lot about Skip as a dog.
Morris addresses Skip in his book as "Old Skip," giving him a very friendly nickname, furthering his friendly tone towards the dog. He also talks about Skip with pride, saying things like, "Our first dogs were the big ones--Tony, Sam, Jimbo--and since they were bird dogs, they had a fine and natural inclination to hunt. Yet Skip was the best of all, for he trampled the woods with an inborn sense of possibility and adventure." His bragging about Skip is an example of his love for him.