My Weekly Book

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams and Mark Carwardine

The history of this book, like everything else connected with Douglas Adams, is anything but straightforward. It appears to have started life as a spread about an endangered lemur in the colour supplement of a Sunday newspaper, moved on to become a radio series, transmuted into a companion book for that series (what we are dealing with here), and been recorded as an audiobook before finishing up as a CD-ROM with photographs, radio excerpts and a sound track of the author reading his text aloud. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article on the subject (see links below), this is a very apposite time to be reading it as a television series featuring Stephen Fry revisiting the species it features to see how they have fared appears to be in the pipeline. Just for the amusement of hardcore Adams fans, I shall also quote this bit: “Many of the excursions were written into the companion book, though not all, allegedly due to Douglas’ notorious writing delays. An example is that of the Amazonian Manatee, covered in a radio episode first transmitted on 18 October, 1989, but not in the subsequent book.”

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As far as hardcore Adams fans go, I would definitely count myself among them. Which means that it is a major oversight that I have not read this book before. I had a lot of expectation built up and, for some reason, possibly because I have been looking forward to it literally for years, I feel just a little bit underwhelmed by it. It has always been my pet theory that Adams is not actually a writer of science fiction novels, although he assumed that disguise with extreme cunning in order to propagate his work to a very wide and appreciative audience. No, I think that Douglas Adams was a philosopher, probably an absurdist philosopher, and a very, very important thinker whose true importance was just starting to be noticed when he bloody inconsiderately went and dropped dead. And Last Chance to See was an important step on his path from humorist to someone who the world needed to take a damned sight more seriously, actually, because he was saying things that we really needed to hear.

There are flashes of truly wonderful, often comical, always challenging original thought in here - for instance, when Adams realises the importance of deconstructing his Western habits of mind in order to accustom himself to being in China - and ends up with a complete set of duty-free aftershaves as a result. Or the time when he comes face to face with a gorilla and attempts to analyse his own reaction to this seemingly uncannily human creature, particularly his desire to see it as uncannily human. But there is also a great deal of what Adams’ biographer Nick Webb calls something like an elaborate shrubbery of anecdotage that surrounded him on all sides. Forgive me, I can’t find the exact quote, even after speed-reading the entire 350 pages of his book, Wish You Were Here. (There is an extensive chapter on the whole Last Chance to See adventure in this book which is recommended reading for anyone who would like more background on how it came to be written and on the relationship between the authors.) But I was hoping, frankly, for slightly more profundity and thought-provoking stuff and slightly fewer funny stories.

It appears from the biography that Adams had his usual towering dose of writers’ block when it came to getting stuck into this one, and that he managed to infect Mark Carwardine with it as well. It is also pointed out that this work, like so many of his others, may have suffered from the problems of format jumping. It is important to remember that in the early 1990s the arguments set out here were groundbreaking and not nearly as widely understood as they are today. In summary, there are lots of excellent reasons why this book is a great read and many more why we are lucky that it is as great as it is. But I’d like to see Adams’ reputation properly secured for posterity. And while this book does a lot in this direction, the published evidence of his brilliance is contained in a few hard-to-find articles, letters, lectures - a far slimmer collection of work than is ideal. It would have made me happier to find more of it here.

I read this because a very kind Bookcrosser made it available as part of a book ring - sincere thanks are due.

Some links:

• h2g2: Last Chance to See
• BBC Cult TV: Last Chance to See
• Wikipedia: Last Chance to See
• Last Chance to See official website
• Mark Carwardine’s website
• Wikipedia: Mark Carwardine
• Information on the third Douglas Adams Memorial Lecture (given by Mark Carwardine)
• Another Chance to See blog
• The Digital Village online memorial to Douglas Adams

This entry was posted on Monday, May 7th, 2007 at 6:32 pm and is filed under 2007 Bookcrossing, 2007 reading challenge. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.