Good Omens: The Nice and Accurate Prophecies of Agnes Nutter, Witch

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2015

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Prologue-Chapter 1

Chapters 2-3

Chapters 4-6

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Chapters 2-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 2 Summary: “Wednesday”

Eleven years later, Warlock’s parents throw an elaborate birthday party for their son, complete with a stage magician—Aziraphale in disguise, whose tired, sleight-of-hand tricks bring only derision from the crowd of cynical children. Meanwhile, Crowley, disguised as a caterer, eyes the birthday gifts looking for the hellhound that was supposed to be delivered to the Antichrist. Concerned that Hell’s bureaucrats neglected to send the birthday gift, Crowley and Aziraphale leave the party to discuss their next course of action. As they speed through Central London, they realize that they’ve been observing the wrong child, and they head to the hospital to search the birth records from 11 years ago.

Far from London, the black dog from Hell strolls across a pasture, seeking his master. Hearing voices, the dog creeps toward an old stone quarry and spies four figures discussing potential birthday gifts. He identifies his master (Adam) among them and abruptly morphs into a much smaller dog when the boy wishes for “not a big dog […] but one of those dogs that’s brilliantly intelligent and can go down rabbit holes” (83). When the boy decides to name his new pet “Dog,” the hellhound trots happily into the quarry, tail wagging, to greet his new master.

At midnight, on a lonely road in Oxfordshire, Anathema Device surveys the surrounding countryside, making notations on a map. She rides her bicycle to the nearby village, Agnes’s book of prophecies in her basket. En route, she is struck by Crowley’s speeding Bentley. Pulling her out of a ditch, Aziraphale heals her minor fracture and repairs her bike, and they give her a lift into town. Back in her cottage, Anathema realizes her book is missing.

At the convent of the Chattering Order—which disbanded after the fire—Mary Hodges, formerly Sister Mary Loquacious, supervises repairs on the building. She is now self-confident, has an interest in finance, and works in management training. When Aziraphale and Crowley finally locate the hospital, they are struck by paintball pellets as they approach the entrance. The former hospital is now Mary Hodges’s management training center, and one of the training activities involves a paintball combat course. As Crowley and Aziraphale explore the former convent, they suddenly hear real gunfire. Crowley admits to changing the paint guns into live weapons, and several participants lie dead — although only temporarily, Crowley promises.

The pair locate Mary Hodges, who acknowledges the baby switch, but before they can confirm the babies’ identities, police storm the building, and Crowley and Aziraphale are forced to flee. Driving back to London, they resolve to employ their own networks of human agents to search for the child. As Crowley drops Aziraphale off at his bookshop, they discover Anathema’s book of prophecies in the car.

After searching for her lost book, Anathema finally realizes the men from the Bentley have it. She hopes they don’t understand its value, but as a collector of rare books of prophecies, Aziraphale knows precisely its value.

War, under a new identity as war correspondent Carmine Zuigiber, is having a drink with battle-hardened reporters from reputable newspapers. She enjoys a cocktail in a hotel bar while hostilities break out. As various political factions claim the hotel for their own, a delivery man brings Carmine a package containing a sword. As she wields it, the factions open fire, killing each other but leaving Carmine unscathed.

Chapter 3 Summary: “Thursday”

Adam Young and his pals—Pepper, Brian, and Wensleydale—discuss the possible existence of witches. They are particularly interested in the woman who just moved into the village, Anathema Device, who “gets a witches’ newspaper” (129). Adam, the unofficial leader of the group, wonders aloud whether they should consider burning witches again. The group decides that, if they are going to persecute witches again like in the Spanish Inquisition, they should acquire at least a few Spanish items. After gathering maracas, a bullfighting poster, and a raffia wine holder, they recruit their first victim: Pepper’s younger sister, who refuses to play along by not denying she’s a witch.

Later, Adam, angry at being punished after coming home from his Inquisition game all muddy, sulks with his pet hellhound, Dog. As he wanders past Jasmine Cottage, he hears crying. Peering over the hedge, he sees Anathema, grieving over her lost book. Agnes Nutter prophesied the end of the world in three days, and, without the guidance of her book, Anathema is powerless to stop it. Adam offers to help her search for it, and Anathema notices a strange, magnetic presence in the boy. “You started to feel that if he was around, then everyone else, even the landscape, was just background” (144). Adam asks Anathema if she’s a witch; she tells him she’s an occultist and invites him inside for lemonade. As she tells him about occultism (and environmentalism), she notices that Adam has no aura. Adam, however, is entranced by her knowledge of witches and paganism, and he decides he likes the new occultist in the village. That night, as he lies in bed, pondering this new knowledge, alarms go off in a nuclear reactor. Five hundred tons of uranium have suddenly vanished.

Chapters 2-3 Analysis

In these chapters, Pratchett and Gaiman begin to slowly weave their numerous plot threads into some kind of coherence. They clarify characters and relationships, and readers get a glimpse of where the screwball plot may be heading. Adam, who was supposed to be raised by the American Cultural Attaché and his wife, has instead grown up with the Young family in Lower Tadfield. Humorous mishaps ensue as Aziraphale and Crowley scramble to correct their mistake, and, along the way, Pratchett and Gaiman frequently veer from the narrative for whimsical social commentary.

They take a skewed look at everything from organized religion to chartered accountancy, sacrificing concision for broad sweeps of humor. When Adam and his friends reenact the Spanish Inquisition, for example, the lengthy passage adds little to the plot, but it gives the authors the opportunity to express their contempt for the hypocrisies of religion and the ways those hypocrisies are so easily modeled for children. Likewise, the collision between Crowley’s Bentley and Anathema Device serves the singular narrative purpose of putting Anathema’s book in Aziraphale’s hands. As such, it requires little exposition, but Pratchett and Gaiman use the incident to make an extended joke about bicycle repairs and Aziraphale’s tendency to go too far with his virtuous deeds.

The characters introduced in Chapter 1 are given a bit of context here. Scarlett, for example, is the actual embodiment of War, one of the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse. Violence and bloodshed follow her wherever she goes—or perhaps they precede her—and she takes great delight in escorting humanity down the path of its own destruction. Pratchett and Gaiman imply that humanity’s darker impulses do indeed overshadow its more virtuous ones, but humankind always has a choice.

That luxury of choice gives Aziraphale and Crowley countless opportunities to debate the true nature of free will. Both are bound by their inherent dispositions; Aziraphale can no more perform an evil act than Crowley can a moral one. But the line between good and evil is never sharply defined. Crowley was once an angel, after all, who had “hung around with the wrong people” (23). His evil is not so much a matter of nature but of choice. Humans don’t like moral ambiguity. It’s confusing and messy, but it abounds in Good Omens, and the lesson seems to be that humanity’s history would be far less bloody if that confusion was embraced rather than ignored.