Let’s skip those hitchhiker books, shall we?
I think I’m going to have to SPOIL some things here, so beware! I don’t want to, but I need advice from our readers, and it won’t work unless I SPOIL things! If you haven’t read these books, you can go a bit further into this post — I promise I’ll put up a SPOILER alert when I’m really going to get into it!
Like a good nerd, I like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels as much as the next person, and consider it one the funnier books I’ve ever read. I liked the original trilogy and especially So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, but man, Mostly Harmless kind of pissed me off because it’s so evilly cynical and Adams ditches Fenchurch, who’s kind of awesome. The end of the “trilogy” almost — not quite, but almost — retroactively ruins the earlier books for me. After the first four books of the Hitchhiker’s series, Adams turned to his two Dirk Gently books (technically, I suppose, the posthumously published The Salmon of Doubt is a Dirk Gently book, but I haven’t read that and I guess it’s kind of not really a Dirk Gently story anyway). Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul came out in 1987 and 1988, respectively, and I have them both in nice first-edition (well, first-edition American versions) hardcovers, because by 1987, I was a fan of Adams and wanted to check out his new stuff. Not to be heretical, but I like these books more than the Hitchhiker’s series. I have some problems with both of them, but Adams had become a better writer in the few years since the original trilogy was done (which might be why I like So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish — it’s a wonderfully written book), and while the Hitchhiker’s books are undeniably funnier, the Dirk Gently books are very funny, too, and often more subtly than the adventures of Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect were. Plus, I just like detective fiction, and Adams puts his astonishingly weird and clever spin on detective fiction in these books. I wish he had written more of them, but perhaps they didn’t make as much money as he thought they would or they were harder to write than he thought they would be (the plots are very convoluted), but at least we have these two!
One of the excellent things about the first book is the absence of the title character for a long stretch to begin the book. Dirk doesn’t show up until Chapter 13 (page 83 in my version), and even then, we don’t know who he is at that point. He had been mentioned before, but he doesn’t show up, which allows Adams to introduce Richard MacDuff and Reg and the Electric Monk and Gordon Way, which allows us to get into the story very well before Dirk bustles in with his utterly chaotic nature. It’s an interesting way to do it, as we need to know a lot of stuff before Dirk comes in, as he tends to dominate things once he shows up. In the second book, Dirk is in the story a bit earlier (Chapter 3, page 33), but in the first two chapters, we get quite a bit about Kate Schechter, whose dilemma drives the plot. In both books, Dirk is simply there to interpret what’s happening to Richard and then Kate, which he can do because he’s such a good investigator (or because he accepts things that other cannot), and Adams does a nice job making sure he’s not the complete focus. Dirk is a force of nature, but Richard and Kate keep the books grounded.
The plots are very fun, too. In DGHDA, Richard MacDuff’s employer (and brother of his girlfriend, Susan), Gordon Way, is killed one evening, and that ties into, well, a lot of other things. In TLDT-TOFS, Kate encounters Thor at a ticket counter at Heathrow and gets involved in god-like things, while Dirk takes on a client who insists he has to be at his house early one morning, and when Dirk oversleeps, the client ends up dead and Dirk feels some guilt about it. The cases are linked, of course, but I don’t want to say more about them! Adams takes his time meandering around, much like his titular detective, who believes in the interconnectedness of all things and therefore often simply follows random cars, for instance, in the hopes that they will take him somewhere he needs to go (which, as this is fiction, often works for him). Adams comes at things sideways, which makes the journey fun, as we’re getting all sorts of seemingly random things happening and then, later (sometimes much later), they come back around and we get what’s been happening. Adams doesn’t hold our hands, either, which is nice — when Gordon Way is murdered, for instance, we can figure out who killed him from context clues, but Adams takes his time coming out and even obliquely referring to it (Way’s death isn’t the primary mystery of the book, so it’s not terribly necessary to hide who the culprit is). When Dirk figures things out, we can stop and think, “Oh yeah …” because it all makes sense, even if it’s “impossible” (Dirk does not reject impossibilities, as he specifically disagrees with Sherlock Holmes in this regard). Adams weaves clever stories, but, as with his more famous books, it’s the way he tells them that’s a good amount of the fun. Here are two examples of his writing, one from each book. I didn’t try to find the best ones, I simply opened the books at random and used the first passages I saw. It’s not difficult to find clever turns of phrase or interesting ways of describing things. (In the first passage, “Svlad Cjelli” is Dirk. He changed his name at some point and it’s never quite clear why, although some unpleasantness during his Cambridge days is probably the reason.)
Dirk turned.
Framed in the doorway stood a tall dark figure.
The tall dark figure appeared to be not at all happy with what it saw, to be rather cross about it, in fact. To be more than cross. It appeared to be a tall dark figure who could very easily yank the heads off half a dozen chickens and still be cross at the end of it.
It stepped forward into the light and revealed itself to be Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary.
“Do you know,” said Sergeant Gilks of the Cambridgeshire Constabulary, blinking with suppressed emotion, “that when I arrive back here to discover one police officer guarding a sofa with a saw and another dismembering an innocent wastepaper basket I have to ask myself certain questions? And I have to ask them with the disquieting sense that I am not going to like the answers when I find them.
“I then find myself mounting the stairs with a horrible premonition, Svlad Cjelli, a very horrible premonition indeed. A premonition, I might add, that I now find horribly justified. I suppose you can’t shed any light on a horse discovered in a bathroom as well? That seemed to have an air of you about it.”
“I cannot,” said Dirk, “as yet. Though it interests me strangely.”
***
A door flopped opened, wobbling perilously on its one remaining hinge, and there emerged from the car a pair of the sort of legs which sound-track editors are unable to see without needing to slap a smoky saxophone solo all over, for reasons which no one besides sound-track editors has ever been able to understand. In this particular case, however, the saxophone would have been silenced by the proximity of the kazoo which the same sound-track editor would almost certainly have slapped all over the progress of the vehicle.
The owner of the legs followed them in the usual manner, closed the car door tenderly, and then made her way into the building.
The car remained parked in front of it.
After a few minutes a porter came out and examined it, adopted a disapproving manner and then, for lack of anything more positive to do, went back in.
Adams does this constantly — he looks at things in an odd way and gives us weird descriptions that can often be funny but also just give us a nice, skewed view of the universe. Combined with the outlandish plots, and the books are just a delight to read. I re-read them every once in a while, and they never fail to make me happy.
However … here I need to SPOIL some things, because I need your help. If you’ve read up to here and haven’t read the books yet but are now intrigued, look away if you don’t want to be SPOILED! But if you have read the books, read on, and maybe you can help me, because something vexes me about both books, really, but the first one in particular:
I don’t get them. I don’t get the ending of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, and I only slightly more get the ending of The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul. And, sadly, the internet is not helpful.
Ok, so I know what happens at the end of the first book, I just don’t get why it works. They take the alien back in time to his spaceship, because he gives them a sad song about all his buddies dying and they want to help fix it. Then they realize that the alien is going to “fix” it by destroying whatever evolved into humans, and they can’t have that. So they go to visit Coleridge and make him forget the rest of Kubla Khan (“the second, and altogether stranger, part of the poem …” as we read on page 44 in my version, which early on leads us to realize that this world is slightly different from our own), which solves the problem. I get all that. Buy why? What was in the poem that helped the alien, and how did its lack thwart the alien? Adams never says, as far as I can tell, but maybe I’m missing it. I have read the book several times, and I always look for it, but I can’t figure it out. Can anyone explain? Similarly, in second book, Odin sells his soul to the Draycotts. Sure, I get that. What I don’t get is how Dirk resolves the situation. The Draycotts are killed, sure, but it’s resolved before that, and I’m not sure how. It doesn’t really appear that anything has changed, but when the Draycotts are killed, the contract becomes null and void, is that it? If that’s true, the entire book becomes kind of pointless — I mean, it’s still fun to read, but Dirk, like Indiana Jones, doesn’t really do much to affect the plot. Maybe I’m just d-u-m. It’s certainly possible.
Can anyone help me out? Anyone out there who has read the books and understands them? I mentioned Adams’s oblique writing style above, and 99% of the time, it’s perfectly charming, but when it comes to explaining what happened — especially in the first book — it falls apart a bit. I just want to get it!
(I should note that these books have been “adapted” into two different television series. I haven’t seen the first one, but the second one, which aired on AMC here in the States, was … well, it wasn’t bad, but it was not great, either, and it had only the loosest connection to the books — it was set in the Pacific Northwest (Seattle) and Montana, and Dirk was once involved with the CIA. They keep the quirkiness of his methods, but it’s just … strange. Samuel Barnett, who was in his mid-30s at the time, looks too young to be Dirk (even though he’s Dirk’s age), and he lacks the chaotic energy that Dirk has on the page. I can’t imagine it’s an easy role, and Barnett, like the show itself, isn’t bad, just off somehow. Elijah Wood is fun as his hapless assistant, though!)
Anyway, if you’ve read the Hitchhiker’s “trilogy” and enjoyed it, you might check these out. They’re better written, still very funny (although perhaps not as laugh-out-loud gonzo funny), and they have interesting plots that go places you’re very much not expecting them to go. Have fun!
