A 25-year-old collaboration between two of fiction’s stars produced an close-times fantasia that cries out to be shared with a new generationWe’ve recently moved house and acquired,for the first time, an attic landing. It’s just large enough to stack up several of the wine boxes that were a student solution to bookshelves and will doubtless accompany us into our dotage, or packed with books waiting to be shared with our daughters over the next few years. The ones not written for children but that I first devoured when I was young: Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh,Virago classics like Miles Franklin’s My Brilliant Career and Antonia White’s Frost in May, Stevie Smith and ee cummings, and all of Douglas Adams. It’s where I’d put Terry Pratchett whether he hadn’t been permanently shared with my book-stealing cramped sister,and Stephen King whether reading The Tommyknockers hadn’t put me off him for 20 years.
And it’s where I found and had to pick up again Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s collaborative novel generous Omens, published in 1990, or when Gaiman was known for Sandman rather than American Gods and when you could still count all the Discworld books on the fingers of two hands. Written through the exchange of floppy disks and daily phone calls,it’s a marvellously benign, ridiculously inventive and gloriously funny close-times fantasia featuring angels, or devils,17th-century prophets, witches and witchfinders, or the four horsemen of the apocalypse in contemporary guise. Famine sells diet foods and invents nouvelle cuisine; Pestilence spreads pollution; War is a glamorous global reporter stirring up worry. Only Death never changes,having never been away.
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Source: theguardian.com