My Weekly Book

The Hitch-Hikers’ Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams

I took a decision early on with this one to count the entire quintrilogy as just the one book in 50 Book Challenge terms. This may look, at first glance, like perverse and masochistic behaviour. But I can assure you that it is entirely logical and sensible, actually. These are quite slim volumes and my goal is to avoid vastly devaluing the 50BC currency by racking up an extra five titles in an implausibly short space of time. Also we tried to watch the film recently and failed because of a piece of idiocy in the listings of Amazon’s DVD rental service which meant we ended up with the ancient BBC television series instead. This in itself turned out to be serendipitous – we decided this was a sign that we needed to watch it. It turned out to be one of those things like the more obscure series of Blackadder where you believe until the moment when you’ve got up from your armchair and started searching for the lost DVD handset that you’d seen the whole thing, and in order, only to be proved wrong.

[Search for Douglas Adams’ books on eBay]

So an enjoyable hike (forgive me) through the TV series which isn’t nearly as bad as some people seem to think. Although references to digital watches are a bit dated in the age of the iPod. Now we’ll have another go at the film and then there’s two discs worth of off-cuts and ‘how we did it’ documentaries, one for that and one for the series. After all this it seemed only fair to give the books another outing. Another reason for my choosing to count the whole Hitch-Hiker saga as one work is that… er, well. I can probably get away with skim-reading at least the one or two volumes after this lot. The BBC series is so faithful to the original that large amounts of the dialogue are largely as written and there’s no need to pay what you might call the closest attention if attempting a re-read so soon after watching it all. Of course, other quite important bits are completely absent, such as the Saga of Beeblebrox’s Brains and the Total Perspective Vortex. But it keeps you paying attention, at any rate.

And now to the point of this review.

Having read The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Restaurant at the End of the Universe I am struck afresh by how incredibly funny, original and intelligent they are. I’m coming round to the view, however, aided by reading Nick Webb’s fantastic biography of Douglas Adams, that our author is not a science-fiction novelist at all and that a lot of the problems with his posthumous reputation stem from this fact (I mean the whingeing cretins who ask ‘but what did Douglas Adams actually do?’). He is, in fact, in a very real sense, an absurdist philosopher who has managed to exploit a popular medium with wild success in order to share his thoughts with an astoundingly wide and varied audience. For confirmation of this outside Hitch-hiker’s I would suggest turning to his famous puddle quotation here – and indeed most of the other material on this page, which also helps prove my point.

But, while the first two books in this series have a vast amount to discuss with us about the universe, our place in it and our futile attempts to rationalise it all, I was disappointed to find that I thought the mask was beginning to slip by book three. Stories abound of Adams being tied to his chair and supervised in a hopeless bid to get him to meet deadlines - and, as Nick Webb recounts, there is actually some truth to them. And in Life, The Universe and Everything it’s starting to show - not least in the dearth of ideas that left me shaking my head over the Starship Bistromath, Krikkit, the Wikkit Gate, the Somebody Else’s Problem field (this is truly the book which substantiates all those endless comparisons between Adams and Terry Pratchett), the Room of Informational Illusions and poor old Agrajag in his Cathedral of Hate. They all have the air of a creative mind that is being stretched for new ideas, to say the least. They do not bear comparison with things like the Infinite Improbability Drive, Deep Thought or even the ‘B’ Ark full of management consultants, hairdressers and telephone sanitizers that turns out to have populated the fledgling Planet Earth. There are still Important Ideas at the core of the book, as demonstrated here:

The darkness of the cloud buffeted at the ship. Inside was the silence of history. Their historic mission was to find out if there was anything or anyone on the other side of the sky, from which the wrecked spaceship could have come, another world maybe, strange and incomprehensible though this thought was to the enclosed minds of those who had lived beneath the sky of Krikkit.
History was gathering itself to deliver another blow.
Still the darkness thrummed at them, the blank, enclosing darkness. It seemed closer and closer, thicker and thicker, heavier and heavier. And suddenly it was gone.
They flew out of the cloud.
They saw the staggering jewels of the night in their infinite dust and their minds sang with fear.
For a while they flew on, motionless against the starry sweep of the Galaxy, itself motionless against the infinite sweep of the Universe. And then they turned round.
“It’ll have to go,” the men of Krikkit said as they headed back for home.On the way back they sang a number of tuneful and reflective songs on the subjects of peace, justice, morality, culture, sport, family life and the obliteration of all other life forms.

But I found myself, by the last page, hoping fervently that So Long and Thanks For All The Fish was going to be an awful lot better. And knowing that, given the story of how difficult Adams found writing it, that actually it was likely to be the nadir of the series.

In reality, the self-styled ‘Fourth Book in the Hitch-Hiker Trilogy’ turned out to be considerably better than I had feared it would. Arthur’s back on the Earth (hitch-hiking) and reality has been ‘readjusted’ to edit out the inconvenient fact that the planet was blown up by the Vogons. Apparently it was the CIA. Or the water supply. Or mass hallucinations, or something. Our hero is now officially an alien abductee - wandering the planet unable to find anyone who can relate to his experiences. Except someone can. And by an extraordinary coincidence…

I liked the way this picked up a seemingly throwaway line from HHG2TG and ran with it. It was a pleasingly simple, linear story that was easy to read and benefited surprisingly well from being set in the author’s native Islington rather than some grimy half-imagined spaceport somewhere. It had an unexpected freshness and creativity and fully substantiated my point about absurdist philosophy, made above. The Ford Prefect interludes do grate a bit - he’s so obviously there as a deus ex machina so that Arthur and Fenchurch can get off the planet when they need to. If I’m being honest, I didn’t like the last 20 or so pages all that much. I found the ending a bit contrived and rather out of tune with the rest of the book in the way it switches from the intimate, small-scale and personal to the global and even galactic so abruptly. But, on the whole, this was one of the more welcome and necessary re-reads. I’m not sure I could have told you everything that happened previously or pinned down all the half-remembered incidents - indeed, if asked, I might have said quite a lot of it was actually part of Dirk Gently (that’s the Islington connection and all the lady cellists) and not HHG at all.

Probably it’s my sense of humour but this passage made me laugh out loud:

Those who are regular followers of the doings of Arthur Dent may have formed an impression of his character and habits which, while it includes the truth and, of course, nothing but the truth, fails somewhat short in its composition of the whole truth in all its glorious aspects… there are other omissions as well, beside the teethcleaning and trying to find fresh socks variety, and in some of these people have often seemed inordinately interested. What, they want to know, about all that stuff off in the wings with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere? To which the answer is, of course, mind your own business. And what, they say, was he up to all those nights on Krikkit? Just because the planet didn’t have Fuolornis Fire Dragons or Dire Straits didn’t mean everyone just sat up every night reading.…This Arthur Dent, comes the cry from the furthest reaches of the gallery… Is he interested in nothing more than tea and the wider issues of life? Has he no spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?

This is so funny because it is so charmingly pre-Internet (the book was written in 1984) that it dates the text as effectively as the digital watch references. Of course, these days, no-one wonders or minds their own business. They go and write lurid slash involving Ford Prefect and post it online for the world to read. It is impossible to guess what the author would have made of this phenomenon despite his extraordinarily far-sighted predictions about the future of the Internet and its effect on human development.But I guess he’d have thought that there’s no high-minded invention with the ability to profoundly affect the future course of civilisation that we can’t find a pointless purpose for, and this is one of many, many that we’ve come up with so far.

Oh, and I think the last chapter is a dig at Sonny Mehta and the circumstances in which the book was written (you’ll have to read the Webb biography for a full explanation, or I’ll hit the character limit for this post.) But, you know what? It did have a lot less about the dolphins than I remembered.

Now the home straight beckons and it’s time to turn to Mostly Harmless. In many ways, we’re right back in the earlier volumes. The action takes place largely off the planet, the narrative has the same happy knack of wandering down any philosophical, scientific or humorous byway that takes its fancy, and a proportion of the original cast is back in play, in that Fenchurch has, literally, winked out of existence in a hyperspace accident (who’d be Arthur Dent, eh?) and Trillian is back in the game although Zaphod Beeblebrox is nowhere to be found. It is witty, erudite and accomplished - and also has a Big Concept, parallel universes (jolly useful things for an author, these) where different versions of our heroes and heroine(s) are leading various different lives on one version or another of the Earth. It’s thoughtful, clever and entertaining (what you might call Parallel Adjectives, those) and the writing and characterisation are far from being the worst in the series. The ending is extremely bleak - but part of me had trouble taking it too seriously. The philosophical underpinnings of the book mean the author had as many get-outs as he could ever have wanted when it came to resurrecting them. I like to think that, somewhere in an alternate or parallel universe, he has survived and carried on writing an increasingly long series of new additions to the Hitch-Hiker’s ‘trilogy’. Maybe we’ll be incredibly fortunate and some of them, like biros, will start dropping through the wormholes in space some day…

This entry was posted on Saturday, May 13th, 2006 at 12:02 pm and is filed under 2006 reading challenge, General, Reads I recommend. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.