form, is the way the comic conceit at the heart of the story is constructed not from one joke but from several jokes fitted together with masterly exactness. One of these jokes is that Englishness is a force of such stubborn power that it rivals the biblical order of the universe. Aziraphale and Crowley, the angel and demon around whom the story revolves, ostensibly work, over millennia on earth, to convert human souls for their respective sides. But in fact they are themselves gradually converted, to a cozy English life of restaurants and houseplants and Queen records, and they end up working to thwart the Apocalypse not for any grand theological reason, but mostly because the idea of the world ending offends their acquired English good sense. (MichaelSheen and David Tennant, who play Aziraphale and Crowley, respectively, brilliantly embody this quality of eternal beings quite looking forward to a nice spot of lunch.) Another joke, related to the first, is that the signifiers of English middle-class life and the signifiers of the Book of Revelation look terrifically ridiculous when juxtaposed. What if the Final Battle began not on the plain of Armageddon but in the village of Lower Tadfield, Oxfordshire? What if the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse had to stop and ask directions from a village busybody out walking his dachshund, and War, Death, and Co. had to take in a lot of confusing talk about roundabouts?

Still another joke is that the eschatological drama of Revelation is essentially the emotional drama of every tween.