The last blog before moving house and going into temporary domestic Internet exile!
I've made it through four of the five 'Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy' novels now, and this fourth one is the one I've fallen in love with. It's a romance of the first order and somehow so lyrical that it blows your mind away. The first three books were very good but very much patchwork quilts of great jokes stitched together with perfunctory plot. This is a proper novel, a story with a beginning and an end and it was immediately the second Douglas Adams novel ('Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency' is the other) to make it into my pantheon. Perhaps it's the casual way that the previous three novels all contribute material to the genesis of this fourth, or perhaps it's the first novel to really explore Arthur Dent as a proper protagonist, or perhaps it's simply a great love story with a lot of flying and mystery. In fact the only time I really didn't like this book was when Ford Prefect popped in and imposed the reality of the first three books into this one and disrupting the narrative flow.
So, to recap, in the first three books the Earth was destroyed, Arthur Dent was saved his friend Ford Prefect and was essentially a passenger and accomplice to the saving of the universe on several occasions. This fourth novel begins with Arthur on a mysteriously resurrected Earth, trying to come back to terms with everything being back to as it was, even if he has been away for eight years and has spent a significant number of those years in a cave on prehistoric Earth. Now he's back and confused. In the previous narrative, there was a throwaway line that just before the demise of the Earth a woman had suddenly realised the perfect way to make everyone happy and was unfortunately destroyed along with the rest of the planet. This is the story of her new life and how it intertwines with the return of Arthur.
In many ways this isn't a Hitch Hiker story. It's not a madcap assortment of sketches for one things, and is really the first novel to be fully out of the shadow of the original radio source material. The third novel, 'Life, The Universe And Everything', was written with new material but was firmly written in the same style and probably with material intended for a third radio series that never happened.
This book is hard to write about, since it is quite ephemeral. It's mainly an introduction to Arthur Dent as a fleshed out prose character as opposed to a far less defined 'erm' machine, as well as a mystery with regards to the un-destroyed Earth, as well as a romance and finally yet another quest for some meaning in life, the universe and everything. That last quest is probably the weakest part but it does make sense in the context of the series as a whole. I would have been far happier if Ford and Marvin hadn't appeared at all but they did and it was done. The path of Marvin the Paranoid Android is, as one would expect, a fairly dismal one through these four novels and his ultimate demise here is quite quite sad but utterly unnecessary. The comedy contained within these pages is light and enjoyable, the prose lithe and gymnastic, and the overall result a remarkably worthwhile novel. It lacks only a sense of wholeness, undermined at the last for previously stated reasons, and yet I recommend it. I don't recommend it as much as 'Dirk Gently' though, nor am I sure this can be read without at least some knowledge of the previous books. Therefore, why not get some knowledge and then read 'So Long And Thanks For All The Fish'. You won't regret it. I only wish I hadn't been put off so long ago by my failed first attempts to read 'Hitch Hiker...' so many years ago.
O.
PS Again, go read 'Dirk Gently'! And buy the DVD! And jump rope! Okay, not the last one.
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