Sympathy for the Devil?

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Poet William Blake once said of John Milton's Paradise Lost, "he [Milton] was a true poet and of the Devil's party without knowing it" (side note, I actually had to write a short paper on this quote for one of my English classes a few months ago and it was a thoroughly deplorable experience). Though I'm not going to talk about Paradise Lost today, this quote rather reminds me of a book I recently read: Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett.

That's not to say that the angels are the bad guys or anything like that. Actually, if I had to pick, I'd say that the demons come across as rather villainy (shocking, I know). However, they're not the real villains of the story. Actually, thinking back on it, I'm not really sure who the villain is in this story. 

In a nutshell, without giving away anything, the book is a comedy about the apocalypse, the son of Satan, and an angel and a demon who like the human world too much to allow the end of days to happen. There is also a sub-plot about the four horsemen of the apocalypse (or four bikers of the apocalypse) and a story line about a witch named Anathema and a witch-hunter named Newton. However, I'm not going to go into the plot too much because I always feel I'm giving too much away; also, Wikipedia does a much better job summarizing the story than I could. Suffice to say that if you have a basic, working knowledge of the fundamentals of Christianity and a sense of humor and recognize that fiction is fiction and not everything is intended to be taken literally, you'll like this book.

Returning to my original point, it strikes me that this is not really a good vs. evil kind of book (fortunately, the world has The Lord of the Rings for that). While the four bikers of the apocalypse are pretty antagonistic, they're not really the instigators in this story. I guess the true instigator would be Adam, the Antichrist. The only problem with that is that he's actually a pretty good kid and (spoiler alert) doesn't end up doing any world destroying. I guess what it boils down to is that not even the demons are always "of the Devil's party". I like to believe that, besides being sublimely entertaining and a joy to read, this book is really about human nature. This novel has reminded me that, whatever else, everyone has free will. No matter the situation, you always have a choice. And it's a pretty good thing that Adam choose not to destroy the world because I think that would have set the 'save the rain forest, whales, and dolphins' movement back a little bit.

Just readin'

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