“This Angel, who is now become a Devil, is my particular friend”: Romantic Satanism and Loving Opposition in Good Omens

Abstract

In the last years of the Cold War, Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett wrote a buddy-comedy about two disillusioned field agents putting humanity before their respective sides to avert nuclear Armageddon. Gaiman’s 2019 television adaptation of Good Omens updated its setting to the present day – a questionable decision in the light of how successfully Ashes to Ashes (2008-2010), Stranger Things (2016-), and The Americans (2013-2018) demonstrated the stylistic and dramatic potential of blending a variety of genres in Cold-War settings. More importantly, while the adaptation kept brief scenes of secret agents meeting in St James Park, they were unrooted from their Cold War context, discarding the novel’s effective (and affective) shorthand for friendship between enemies in the shadow of mutually-assured destruction. In his DVD commentary, Gaiman explained that he “wound up having to write this [screenplay] as a love story. And part of the joy of writing a love story is the breakup” (“Hard Times” 51:58-52:12). For the necessary emotional tension, the adaptation found an imaginative framework in the novel’s literary ancestry: Romantic Satanism. With their partnership as gentleman-spies stripped away, the adaptation exposed, at the core of Crowley and Aziraphale’s relationship, the paradoxical opposition and fluidity of angels and devils found in British Romantic-Satanic literature, like William Blake’s illustrated Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790).