The More Than Complete Hitchhiker's Guide

ISBN 978-0517693117

Some books are phenomenons. The Hitchhiker’s Guide is a cult classic. Once in awhile, a reader might review some previous works with a new eye. For instance, the last time this reviewer read this work, Douglas Adams was alive. He now, sadly, no longer is having died in May 2001 shortly before the attacks on the World Trade Center.

Adams spanned a long career of writing about science fiction and contributed to the venerable TV series Doctor Who. The Hitchhiker’s Guide was meant to be first a radio show and so it was therefore a script. It was only a book incidentally.

A more mature reading of Adams’s work proves to have borrowed extensively from the Bible. This “Biblical Theme” is a running current throughout his work. It is not a stretch to say that everything written here is an exercise in absurdity. Adams takes more than a few pot shots at religion, although he attempts to play these shots off as being part of “how the universe works”. There is a certain “Mark Twain” type of mechanism at work here, though, because a lot of what Adams is saying as jokes are actual things that are happening. It is clear he is borrowing from the Bible, the search for the shipwreck of the Titanic, a lot of “conspiracy theories” about “lizard aliens” and a host of other bits and pieces that formed the matrix of the latter-half of the 20th century. Twain would famously travel to Israel and write about how no living person would want to live there in their right mind only to be used as a mouthpiece of prophecy since Israel would literally be a thriving country not all that long after his death. Sometimes, the joke is on ourselves even when we think the joke is on everyone else.

Interestingly Adams hated his characters from Arthur Dent to Ford Prefect to Zaphod. He became defined by the success of these characters, but he was also imprisoned by them.

As a collective work, the Hitchhiker’s Guide does not cohere together fluidly or well. There is a lot of repetition. There are large gaps that are not explained. Indeed, the book reads a little like one had a stroke, and then came back and forgot whatever was being written about before other than some broad recollections. In between times the main characters are most often drunk. This is maybe not terribly surprising, since the idea for the book came to Adams when he was laying drunk in a field starring up at the stars–or so we think. Adams establishes very early on that he is not a reliable storyteller or fact-keeper. He is aware of his contradictions in his work, and he informs the reader that this is mostly “their problem”.

Among all this insanity is some quite witty writing combined with some actually surprisingly good prose. The story that does cohere together is entertaining in about the length and duration one would want a radio show to be. It is juvenile, and it is sacrilegious, but it is also, at times, genuinely amusing. Yet, in this amusement one begins to tire of the merry-go-round whirlwind of absurdity. One starts to crave a plot that actually means something other than buffoonery. This is the nature of nonsense writing such as the Hitchhiker’s Guide. Nothing is especially enriched at a soul level for having read the work. It was entertaining.

An interesting technical point concerning Adams was that his last message in his forum read thusly:

Re: Mac OS X

I was going to wait till the summer to install it, but I succumbed and installed it last week. It takes a little getting used to, old habits are hard to reform, and it’s not quite finished (what software ever is), and much of the software that’s out to run on it is Beta.

But…

I think it’s brilliant. I’ve fallen completely in love with it. And the promise of what’s to come once people start developing in Cocoa is awesome…

Two weeks later, Adams was dead after heaping praise on the “cult of Apple”.

When asked what made him pick the number 42 as the answer to life, the universe, and everything, he said he looked out his window into his garden and simply felt like that would be the right choice. Did Adams die after eating the forbidden fruit? Even Marvin would have had to have appreciated that universal joke although Adams, at the age of 49, probably was not laughing.