Author's product rating: 
| Advantages: |
Great story, great characters |
| Disadvantages: |
Some of the jokes just don't work |
| Recommend to potential buyers: |
yes |
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has long been regarded as a comedy classic and a milestone in science fiction writing, and has spawned a whole host of copycat books, most of which failed miserably to live up to the original and best. The beauty of it lies in the originality of the idea, even if some of the jokes try to be a little clever for their own good, and to be honest, some passages read quite awkwardly.
That said, re-reading this novel for the first time in ages was a very enjoyable experience. A lot of it is probably because the characters and the plot are so familiar – I’ve heard the radio play, seen the 1980s TV series and read all five books in the trilogy (yes, a trilogy of five in classic Adams fashion...) so many times that I remembered bits of storyline before I’d even reached the right page.
However, for those of you who might not be familiar with the course of events, here goes: This is the story of
Arthur Dent, a deeply average human whose life in turned upside down and inside out one Thursday morning when council bulldozers arrive to knock his house down and make room for a bypass. That is nothing compared to the events that await him however – his best friend, Ford Prefect, turns out to be not what he had seemed at all, and the rest of the day is taken up with an intergalactic superhighway, the destruction of the planet, the worst poetry in the universe, some extreme improbability, a man with two heads and three arms, a girl from Islington and an old man called Slartibartfast, who has a strange fixation with fjords.
You also get to meet Marvin the paranoid android, a machine that epitomises technology gone wrong. He was one of the first androids to be ‘blessed’ with a realistic human personality, with the result that he is the most profoundly depressed and depressing robot ever created. Zaphod Beeblebrox, Ford Prefect, Trillian and Arthur himself will be familiar to most people, but the highlights are generally provided by the excerpts from the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself. This is basically an electronic guidebook to the universe, with roving reporters criss-crossing distant star systems to send in reports on exotic planets and alien civilisations like the Hooloovoo (a hyper-intelligent shade of blue), or the Earth, which is described in just one word: ‘Harmless’.
The TV series supplemented the passages from the Guide with some high-quality (for their time) computer animations, the most memorable of which was for the Babel Fish – a creature which I sincerely hope is not discovered any time soon, as it would immediately put me out of a job! It’s a small fish-like animal, which is able to interpret to and from any known language once it is inserted into your ear, thus rendering all translators redundant at a stroke.
Things like this are the book’s strong point – creatures, places and inventions that are somehow credible, despite the fact that the reader knows that they are no more than figments of Douglas Adams’ imagination. Slartibartfast is a great character and Magrathea is an inspired concept, while the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation and its multi-planet sized complaints department could quite easily be compared to the Microsoft we know and love today, for example!
Where I find that the book is a little weak, however, is in the dialogue and the sometimes laboured attempts to crack jokes in the text. Character traits are exaggerated, and not always with the intended effect – Zaphod and Ford try to outcool one another with glib one-liners, and while you can see what
Adams wanted to say, sometimes it doesn’t come across quite right. Occasionally, he hits the nail on the head – the effect of a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster is spot on, and I love the expression of Vogon ships hanging in the air ‘just like bricks don’t’. You just get the impression that he wanted to make these jokes that sounded really good when he thought them up, but just did not have the same effect when pinned to the page.
That aside, this is a cracking read – you will laugh out loud at some of the jokes, and I found that the characters and everything came flooding back to me after just a few pages. Even if you have never read the book before, a basic knowledge of science fiction means that you will probably know what answer Deep Thought is going to give to the great question of life, the universe and everything, but I found that I still had to keep reading to find out! That is the book’s great strength – despite my gripes and moans, the basic premise of the book is still a winner, and its status as one of the most important science fiction novels ever written is assured. White mice, eh. Who’d have thought it?
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