Clara’s Verdict
Some books are beloved; some are defended with the fervour of a personal creed. Good Omens belongs to the second category, and this full-cast production from Headline is the best possible argument for why. Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote the novel together in 1990, trading chapters and jokes in what they later described as a state of near-continuous invention. The result is one of the funniest serious books about theology, mortality, friendship, and the end of the world that has ever been published – and this audio production is, at last, the version the book has always deserved.
Michael Sheen as Aziraphale and David Tennant as Crowley is casting so perfect it feels inevitable in retrospect. That this production was a finalist for the 2023 AUDIE Awards for Audio Drama and Fantasy is surprising only because it should have won outright. After reviewing more than two thousand audiobooks, productions of this quality remain genuinely exceptional.
About the Audiobook
The world is scheduled to end on Saturday. The Antichrist has been born, accidentally placed with the wrong family in Tadfield, Oxfordshire. The armies of Good and Evil are mobilising. And two beings who have been on Earth since the Beginning – Aziraphale, a fussy, bookshop-owning angel who has grown fond of first editions and Soho restaurants, and Crowley, a demon with a fondness for fast cars, designer sunglasses, and houseplants he bullies into health – have grown rather too attached to civilisation to see it destroyed on a Saturday.
The comedy operates simultaneously on several distinct levels. There is the broad absurdism of the Four Horsepersons of the Apocalypse, who include a professional assassin named War and a telemarketer named Pollution. There is the sharper satirical comedy of the religious bureaucracies on both sides – heavenly and infernal – which have become mirror images of one another over the millennia: all policy documents, middle management, and performance reviews, with no actual theology in evidence. And then, running through it all, is something genuinely moving: a friendship between an angel and a demon that has survived six thousand years and represents, in Gaiman and Pratchett’s quietly radical argument, the finest possible thing that humans – and supernatural beings – can manage.
The novel is set mostly in England, and the Englishness of it all is crucial. The humour is deeply British: dry, circuitous, fond of footnotes, delighted by its own absurdity. Published by Headline, running 12 hours and 14 minutes.
The Narration
The full-cast production is transformative. Michael Sheen’s Aziraphale is everything the character requires – fretful, slightly pompous, fundamentally kind, and capable of surprising ferocity when the people he loves are threatened. David Tennant’s Crowley is equally brilliant: languid, stylish, and genuinely funny in the way that only someone who completely understands a character can be. Rebecca Front provides the authorial narration with exactly the right tone of benign cosmic amusement. The supporting cast – Arthur Darvill as Newton Pulsifer, Katherine Kingsley as Anathema Device – are uniformly excellent. This is a production that has understood the source material at every level and given it everything it deserves.
What Readers Say
Good Omens holds a 4.6 rating from 36 Audible UK listeners. One reviewer described it as “the book I keep going back to,” citing the humour, the imagination, the premise, and the sense that its mindset had helped shape them as a reader – “sort of set a standard of what I call a good read.” Another called it “the funniest book about the Apocalypse I’ve ever read,” noting with accuracy that this is not quite the competitive category it sounds. A Pratchett devotee who had long resisted reading his collaborative work found it “well-written and entertaining, with some lovely glimpses of Pratchett for those who are missing him” – a tribute both to the quality of the writing and to the particular ache of losing one of our finest comic novelists too soon.
Who Should Listen?
The answer to “who should listen” is approximately everyone. More specifically: fans of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels, readers who love Douglas Adams, and anyone who has ever looked at organised religion and found it simultaneously fascinating and deeply absurd will feel immediately at home. The Amazon Prime Video series is excellent and faithful, but the audiobook has something that television cannot replicate: the density of the prose, the footnotes, and the accumulated wit of two writers at the height of their powers working in concert and trying to make each other laugh. Available on Audible UK, Kobo, Scribd, and Storytel.
Listen to the full-cast production of Good Omens on Audible UK.
