captaind's Full Review: Douglas Adams - The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Gala...
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is, without any doubt, one of greatest works of comedy science fiction ever written – in my opinion the greatest. It has everything – hilarious characters, surreal situations, a cracking plot, and sparkling wit on every page.
The plot basically follows thus:
Arthur Dent awakens one day to find that his house is about to be knocked down by the council to make way for a new bypass. When he complains, a man (who reminds me very much of our Landlord’s smarmy Area Manager) explains that the plans had been up for his perusal for months – albeit behind a locked door in a disused lavatory with no lights in the basement, but they were there. Arthur is, naturally, not very happy that his house is about to be knocked down.
By a strange quirk of fate, the planet Earth is also about to be destroyed (by an alien race that write awful poetry) to make way for a new intergalactic hyperspace bypass. The plans had been available for public viewing for months… just down at the nearest star, Alpha Centuri, a mere 4 light years away… honestly, if the people of Earth can’t even be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, they deserve what’s coming to them…
Fortunately for Arthur, his friend Ford Prefect is actually a visitor from Beetleguise, researching a new entry for Earth in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. (The old entry was “Harmless”. When you find out what the new entry will be – I’m not going to tell you – you realise that Douglas Adams must have spent at least some of his life playing the computer game “Elite”!) He and Arthur manage to escape from Earth, but their troubles are far from over… in fact, they’ve only just begun…
There’s so much to like about this book that it’s hard to know where to begin… the writing is absolutely brilliant, for a start. It would have been a good book even without the humour – the plot is well developed and perfectly placed, and keeps you in suspense about several key plot areas nearly until the end of the book. There’s plenty of action but it all blends in seamlessly – it never feels like you’re reading a set piece, then a narrative passage, then another set piece – the action and narrative drive are perfectly homogenous. The various inventions, situations, and places in the book are all interesting, and some are just plain bizarre. Adams’ descriptive prose is good without being too lengthy, but his real talent lies in twisting science fiction to his own warped ends and creating highly unbelievable characters that you somehow believe in. Ideas like the Infinite Improbability Drive are very original in themselves, but the fact that to get it to work you need to link it up to a freshly made, really hot cup of tea to get it to work is priceless. The characters range from an egomaniac with two heads to hyper-intelligent, pan-galactic beings in the form of small furry rodents, who have a far different place in human history than was previously thought. (”You see, they really were very clever hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional beings”.)
This is the sort of book that’ll have you sniggering to yourself the whole way through and will occasionally have you helpless with laughter, and doesn’t suffer from repeated readings – if anything, you’ll find yourself roaring with laughter just anticipating certain parts of the book! (Obviously, this can make it take a bit longer to actually finish the book…)
I read the book after seeing the wonderful BBC mini series, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying the book – they’re very closely linked yet somehow very different entities. Sci-fi fans with a sense of humour shouldn’t be without either of them – they’re both worth 6 stars at least! There is one truly wonderful scene in the book that is left out of the mini-series, where Arthur and Co visit the publishing house that produce the guide… Marvin (the paranoid android)’s logic in dealing with a killer robot is exquisite, as is his one-line comment afterwards… I hope they have this in the film version that’s supposed to be on its way!
(If you got here by clicking on a link that said this was one of my worst book reviews, I hope you were disappointed – I’ve completely re-written it!)
This book is mainly reviewing the first two books of the trilogy (“The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” and “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe”), and I haven’t touched on the plot of the third and fourth ( “Life, the Universe, and Everything” and “So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish” -yep – this is a trilogy in FOUR parts!), partly because I’m more familiar with the first two books, partly not to be accused of giving away too many spoilers, and partly because the third book is pretty forgettable while the fourth, although good, is nowhere near up to the standard of the first two (particularly the second). The mini-series, in fact, is based entirely on the first two books.
As a whole, the combined volume is undoubtedly an all-time classic, despite the relative weakness of the third and fourth books. If you like Sci-Fi, you must buy it… if you don’t like sci-fi, you’re seriously losing out here!
Incidentally, this is a rewrite of an earlier review… which, I know find, wasn’t even fo rthe right book, but another of the same name by different authors! I don’t feel bad about this, though, since no-one else has noticed either in over a year! :-O)
Here's the review of the Mini-Series I keep referring to!
If you enjoyed the book, you might also enjoy Strata.
IRRESISTIBLE! --The Boston GlobeSeconds before the Earth is demolished to make way for a galactic freeway, Arthur Dent is plucked off the planet by hi...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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