The Crow Road: 'One of the best opening lines of any novel' Guardian

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In episode 6, Maggie and Nina help Aziraphale defend his bookshop and Gabriel from the demons, using fire extinguishers and throwing encyclopedias. While they’re doing this, Crowley has gone to heaven with Muriel to try to find out what’s going on with Gabriel. Aziraphale finally defeats the demons by using his halo, but is worried that he may have just started a war between heaven and hell. The first thing to notice is the context for your meeting with the crow. Was the encounter something could reasonably be expected to happen in the course of a normal day? Did you, for example, see crows whilst out walking somewhere where there are lots of wild birds? In addition to this broad symbolism, the details of your meeting with a crow may affect its meaning. Let’s take a look at some of the different scenarios and what they could signify. 1. A Single Crow Muriel is given Iain Banks’ The Crow Road to read, but that’s a little too heavy for an angel who has only been on Earth fewer than 24 hours. I’d want to give Muriel something genre-bendy to stay engaged, something about good people doing bad things and bad people doing good things to connect to on a personal level, something with gods navigating their powers in unprecedented ways to better understand Heaven and Hell, and something romantic instead of taking Aziraphale’s weird explanations as truth. I think Muriel would dig this story about reincarnated gods, falling in love, and doing what’s right even when it’s the hard thing and goes against everything you were taught. This is the tale of the McHoan clan of Gallanch: a gifted, eccentric and somehow cursed Scottish family, told mostly through the eyes of young Prentice McHoan. As the novel begins, we see him going through the angst of a young man at the beginning of the nineties; estranged from his father, jealous of his successful elder brother Lewis, hopelessly in love with his cousin by marriage Verity, and totally lost as to what to do with his life. Even though nobody knows it, the world is on the verge of the First Gulf War, and the tapestry of fragile international relations are about to be torn for ever.

Or was the meeting surprising in some way? Perhaps a crow appeared just outside your window. And perhaps you live in an apartment on the 26 th floor, in the middle of the city! Aziraphale has obviously been using Gabriel’s box for storage, as the two plays we can see in the box in episode six are mentioned in Aziraphale’s introduction in the book; they are lost plays of Shakespeare Aziraphale has managed to get hold of, An Excellent Conceited Tragedie called Golde Diggers of 1589 and The Comedie of Robin Hoode, or, The Forest of Sherwoode. The existence of lost Shakespeare plays is real, but the specific titles are jokes from the book (this third is The Trapping of the Mouse, a reference to both the play within a play in Hamlet and the world’s longest-running play by Agatha Christie).The name of Nina’s coffee shop, Give Me Coffee Or Give Me Death, is apparently a shout-out to a famous stand-up sketch by Suzy Eddie Izzard, in which he explains why the Spanish Inquisition would not have worked if carried out by the Church of England, because they would just offer victims “tea and cake or death?” and everyone would choose cake. Then we were going up to Glasgow, mum and I, and we were passing a shop window full of TVs, and so I tried this new gift for messing up TV screens on them, and hummed away to myself, and all the screens went wild! And I was thinking Great, I really can do magic! The effect is getting stronger! I could appear on TV and do this! Maybe it would make everybody’s screens go weird!’ The Crow Road" explores themes of death, faith, morality, and self-discovery, resonating with Aziraphale and Crowley's experiences in Good Omens. It also features a mystery that parallels Gabriel's arrival and memory loss in the series. The Crow Road" is the name of a street in the west of Glasgow, but serves as well as a metaphor for death, as in "He's away the Crow Road". The appropriateness of this title becomes apparent as the novel progresses. But the novel is something else; something that inevitably passed me by first time round. For Scottish people of my generation (roughly the same age as Prentice), it occupies a poignant place in space and time. We could see that the world we were going to live in would be very different from what had gone before – but at the same time we felt connected to and shaped by the peculiar traditions and values by which our parents and grandparents had lived.

Saraqael seems to be the only one of the Heavenly host with any real intellect, a knowledgeable and observant being in a celestial beehive full of drones. It’s tempting to give this angel something sprawling yet intricate, but I’m veering toward short and punchy with Tread of Angels. The premise has angels in it, yes, but they’re nothing like what Saraqael is used to. The Weird West setting mixed with the noir-style murder mystery would be a stretch for sure, but unexpected is something I think Saraqael would be into. If anything, it would make the angel think and push some of Saraqael’s buttons. On his way to Edinburgh in episode three, Aziraphale plays Glenn Miller’s ‘Moonlight Serenade’ in the Bentley. This piece featured in Doctor Who’s World War Two-set two-parter, ‘ The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances’ (a story which significantly set up the Doctor as a character with possible romantic interests and implied that he was not, as many fans had thought for some years at the time, asexual), as well as ‘Revelation of the Daleks’. When the book was published in 1992, I devoured it in a weekend. At the time I recall being mildly disappointed by what seemed like a rather conceptually slight work; almost too conventional compared with the relentless gothic nastiness of the author’s notorious debut, The Wasp Factory, or the sheer imaginative triumph of his masterpiece The Bridge. Such showboating accentuates the feeling that Gaiman – who says this new season draws on a conversation he and Pratchett had in 1989 about a second book – didn’t quite know what to do with the recommission. In the hunt for fresh ideas he now shares his main-writer credit, too, and the name of the new recruit will make connoisseurs of British comedy pay attention: John Finnemore.The Crow Road not only thematically connects to Gabriel and the overarching themes of mortality in Good Omens, but it also ties into Aziraphale and Crowley's heart-wrenching conclusion in season 2. Crowley, with the help of Nina and Maggie, comes to terms with his emotions for Aziraphale and implores him to remain on Earth, promising happiness together. However, Aziraphale opts for a prestigious position offered by the Metatron in Heaven. The Crow Road additionally delves into Prentice grappling with unrequited love, similar to Crowley's predicament in the finale of Good Omens season 2. Moreover, it explores unconventional love that transgresses societal norms, with Prentice harboring feelings for his cousin, Verity, while Crowley, a demon, finds himself enamored with an angel. Nothing is going particularly well for Prentice. He's a failing student. He's in love with a girl named Verity — she "who put the 'phany' in epiphany" — but it's unrequited. He's estranged from his father. He's home in the Highlands for his grandmother's funeral when her body explodes in the crematorium because someone forgot to remove her pacemaker. Paradoxically, though, The Crow Road also includes my favourite supporting character in all of Banks' books, Prentice's father, Kenneth McHoan. I know most people love Rory and his globe trotting bohemianism, but Kenneth is a cooler guy and a great Dad. From his River Game (a home made, violence free game of trade economics) politics and love for his son, to his children's stories, atheism and wonderfully fitting death, Kenneth was the part of The Crow Road I longed to read. When he wasn't there I was thinking about him, and when he was there I never wanted his part to end. Plus, I kinda wish he'd been my Dad.