Questions about Dirk Gently:Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul (spoilers wanted)

Cafe Society
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Original thread is here http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=280499 (but doesn’t address this question)

Can anyone tell me the significance of Thor’s counting all the stones in Wales? It’s brought up in Chapter 22 when he first goes to Kate’s apartment. He says very fiercely that he thinks he lost count, but he’s not doing it again.

At the end, in Chapter 32, Kate, who seems pretty on the ball and you think would remember the earlier conversation, brings it up again, trying to get him to tell her in exchange for the answer to Odin’s linen problem. He basically gives her the same answer again, adding “Think, girl, think!”

Next we hear, she’s apparently given him the solution. Did she just give in? Did he give in and give her a number, even though they knew it was probably wrong? The re-emphasis, and being part of the big wrap-up, smacks of a mystery that should have some kind of answer (perhaps due to several things in other Douglas Adams novels that just seemed weird or mysterious at the time having later fallen into place, sometimes years later, and added depth and meaning to the stories for me.)

Anyone have any background? What did it mean to you? Been driving me a little crazy. Thanks.

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I can’t answer your question. But apparently I need to go back and reread this, as I don’t remember any of this stuff being in the book. In fact, every time I try to remember anything about it, I get stuff from the other book.

Sorry, I just had to share that. Back to your regularly scheduled thread…

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Here’s the long version, some of the factors I’ve considered that might be important.

At first I thought it might be an allusion to some folklore or mythology I wasn’t aware of. Something about the number of stones in Wales, or some clever tricksters solution to a similar problem that got the answer without having to do the counting. But Thor is not known as clever, and I didn’t see anything that might indicate he brought in Loki or Toe Rag or someone to be clever for him.

I did find some legends about various groups of standing stones in England (though I found none in Mid-Glamorgan) that said it was impossible to count them, or to count them twice and get the same result, sometimes saying that trying to count them more than once would make you go mad or die (and perhaps these legends are more common knowledge in England, so he just dropped it in without any further detail, thinking people would immediately know what he was talking about?)

Then there’s several comments I’ve seen with people being unsatisfied with the endings of the Dirk Gently books, saying he ties things up a little too quickly, neatly, deus-ex-machina, whatever. This is possibly partly because Adams had a reputation for procrastinating and might have been pressured to just wrap it up and get it to the printers. So maybe he just brought in an element from earlier to try and tie it to the ending, add a little artificial drama where Thor got to yell some more, and the “Think, girl, think!” is just reprimanding her to remember what they’d already talked about, and not to work out for herself what he’d actually done about it?

That’s kind of the simplest, if most unsatisfying answer. That there is no answer, no mystery. For me, it would make it’s inclusion, and re-emphasis in the final act even more maddening. A lot at the end is kind of told in hints. You can make it all out if you concentrate, think a bit, and catch all the info you can connect it to other events and work it all out.

Is it something to do with the Guilt God? The “interconnectedness of all things”? Thor uses a similar gesture describing the smallest rocks he had to count and when referring to molecules (there are as many ways to get to Asgard as there are tiny pieces)…does that mean something?

The question of the stones is actually brought up a third time, by the god Dirk sits next to at the Challenging Hour feast. He mentions Thor won’t tell anyone the answer, and always replies “Count 'em yourself” and goes off and sulks when asked. His response always seems to be a combination of anger at people who ask him to just give up the answer it took him years to get, and anger at himself for (presumably) not knowing the answer, at least not the correct answer.

Probably totally unrelated, but the old Seer who sits on top of the poles in Mostly Harmless also makes the point “You think I’m going to tell you just like that what it took me forty springs, summers and autumns sitting on top of a pole to work out?” Obviously I’m grasping at straws here…

Some kind of point about humans (even good-natured humans in the process of trying to help these gods fallen on hard times) wanting to quantify the gods, gain their knowledge of the universe, take from them the one thing that makes them special, or different from us? Or just Thor getting tricked and bested again, faced with a problem he can’t solve with might and a hammer?

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I think it might be more of a "How Long is the Coastline of Britain"-style question?

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I don’t know whether this is relevant, but in Douglas Adams’ Starship Titanic there is a talking bomb that always gets confused when its countdown is interrupted.

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Hmm…interesting concept. How he’s supposed to be counting them is of course another question…just the one’s sitting loose on the surface? Any that are visible at all (partially buried), or all the rocks down to where they become molten?

An of course, Wales is known for mining, so they’d constantly be making more rocks that fit his criteria out of larger rocks, and possibly then exporting many of those outside of Wales. From his reactions, my guess is he’s mad because doesn’t have a correct answer, so he doesn’t have that one special piece of knowledge that would let him feel superior, and it burns him that he wasted all those years on the boring penance task with nothing to show for it.

So maybe the question is why Kate, knowing this, would ask him again at that point in the story, and what answer, if any, she finally got. He also mentions that while he was in Wales doing the counting, he shaved his beard. Just a coincidence? Trying to blend in? Or implying that his head (being within the size limits) is made of stone and he had to uncover it to count it? Thor gets confused just trying to count his heads?

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You’re making far too big a deal out of it. It’s not a reference, or an allusion, or a metaphor.

It’s simply a ridiculous punishment. Kate, having been told about it by Thor, is naturally curious as to the answer.

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I don’t remember either book clearly, but I think this one had the stuff about pizza delivery and a wandering vending machine in it.

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I’d always assumed it was Sysiphean task assigned to the mythological Thor, but if there’s anything about such a task available online, it’s not easy to find. So I guess it was just DA assuming that this is a way that Odin might have punished his wayward son, and completely invented but in tune with the mythology he was writing about.

And I think the answer was probably not an actual number, but ‘100% of the Welsh stones,’ or ‘lots.’ The kind of thing that most people would say off the bat but that Odin could safely occupy Thor with because he was too dumb to realise it was a trick question.

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When Thor does the “think, girl, think!” line it’s right after he says to her, “I already told you I lost count in Mid-Glamorgan!” It’s more like he’s showing that he can remember and think clearly after his big ol’ temper tantrum and Odin was no longer messing with his godly powers at Toerag’s instigation.

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I’d wondered about something like that…if she was just being wily and feminine and trying to get a rise out of him to help him keep his edge (although he’d been grumpy several times before, including the first time she asked him that…seemed like he really needed to chew up some scenery for it to do much good as far as clearing his head…maybe just to cheer him up, get his determination back after he got kind of depressed and was saying “Blast everything.” Although I’d think just giving him the solution to his problem would be enough to do that, without making him deny the count thrice before the cock crows.

Something else I came up with while thinking about this (and some of this may get into areas related to Gail Andrew’s view of astrology as a way of sifting reality, or alternatively, the Foucault’s Pendulum/DaVinci Code phenomenon of finding a secret conspiracy because that’s what you set out to look for) is the idea that Thor, a god, a creative force in the universe, has been observing the world, literally looking under every rock for truth, and now the world wants him to share what he’s found, but he’s protective of it, and not sure if it’s really good enough. Kind of a metaphor for the writing process, and people demanding new books from him, maybe before he thinks they’re ready. (maybe something along the lines of the story metaphor at the end of Basquiat, if you’ve seen that)

Ideally, I’d like to find a neat little solution that ties in with several other facts from the book, and all becomes crystal clear and adds depth and meaning to the rest of the story (whether consciously intended by the author or no)…but a logical answer to why she asked her question again, and if she was just satisfied getting the same answer again, or perhaps got something more between the lines as a condition for her solution to putting Odin in Woodshead, would at least get rid of that nagging itch in the back of my brain.

(and while I’m perhaps “thinking too deeply” about all this…when Odin is at last back in Woodshead right afterwards, and Kate comes in to tell him everything’s taken care of, he’s thinking about how much he likes the way Sister Bailey smoothed down the sheets around him five minutes ago, and also 10 minutes before that. Assuming that she kind of tucks him in like that just after he gets back into bed after the bed’s been remade…why had she also done it such a short time before? Is he just drifting in and out, his days all running together…or was there some strange reason she visited him twice so close together? Or was one of the Sister Baileys an IMPOSTOR!)

(again, depending on how much I’m feeling that there actually is a deeper meaning behind all this, that last little fact is either the key to everything, or proof that I’m crazy.)

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SciFiSam, I know the task of counting the stones itself is just an immortals equivalent of writing “I will not ask Odin dumb questions during the Challenging Hour” on the board 500 times. I’m curious if there are similar myths (with answers) as a possible clue to what happened, but the main conflict seems to be that the question is asked three times, the last time in the form of
Step 1: “Tell me the answer you did not tell me before, or this story cannot have a happy ending.”
Step 2: “As I said before, I cannot tell you the answer.”
Step 3: ???
Step 4: [story has a happy ending]

(and if step 1 was just an idle threat, why did she make it)

Thanks for all the responses and ideas…I think just talking about this is helping, giving me a lot of new things to think about and ways to think about them…feel like I’m getting close!

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The other possibility is that, being Thor, when he gets frustrated at the mundane nature of the task, or at losing count, he goes and smashes something, thus creating more stones to count.

However, I don’t think there’s an added level of subtlety to the rock counting subplot.

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But Thor wasn’t able to go THOR SMASH!!! at the start of the story because bad things happened to people when he lost his temper (like the fighter pilot, the girl from the airline counter etc).

I think it was more likely that Odin ordered Thor to do it just to give him a mindless task and keep him occupied for a while, probably urged to do it by Toerag (who was all along working to subvert Odin’s authority and knew that Thor would put the kibosh on his plans if he found out).

Sister Bailey was probably just being a good nurse and fussing over her favorite patient. She had a definite soft spot for “Mr. Odwin” and for as old and sickly as he looked, it’s not surprising she’d look in on him a lot . She didn’t know he was immortal, after all.

I still don’t think there’s any cosmic riddle significance behind Kate asking Thor about how many rocks the second time. If I were Kate, and Thor A) blew up the airport and put me in the hospital, B) scared the hell out of me with the streetlights blowing out, C) pissed off my neighbor and turned the lamp into a cat, D) dragged me off to Asgard and threw a godly hissy fit, and E) left me behind with the crazy old woman, I wouldn’t want to help him for free either :smiley:

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Like the Sister Bailey explanation. Yes, I can definitely see that. Like how that takes it from just something that happened to a reinforcement of the special care and attention she was giving him. Exactly the kind of deeper appreciation I’m looking for while playing around with the stones question.

Okay, so…the house leek. Common plant growing on stone walls and cottage roofs all over England. Called *Sempervivum * (or Liveforever, a big theme in the book)

http://www.oldtimeremedies.co.uk/labels/shingles.html

Also called stone-crop and Ayegreen (the green-eyed monster!)

Dedicated to Thor, and sometimes called Thor’s Beard (he mentioned he shaved his beard off while in Wales!)

Called sedare in Latin, which comes RIGHT NEXT TO sedra in “The Plant Book- A Portable Dictionary of the Vascular Plants” (sedra as a cure for eagle wounds is also mentioned a second time by the same god who brings up counting the stones the second time) (sedra being the Chinese Date or jujube)

The linked article mentions it is “identical with that of the Apple.”, curiously capitalizing the common word apple, to make it like the Apple, Douglas Adams being known as a huge fan of Apple computers!

Coincidence? Or did Douglas Adams write this book while leafing through a plant guide!?! (okay, probably coincidence, although he did write the book about the same time he was really getting into biology and nature, building up to Last Chance to See)

Starting to re-read The Salmon of a Doubt (which I just kind of skimmed and was mad at when it came out, after billing itself as 'Hitchhiking the Galaxy One last Time", then including hardly any Hitchhiker material, but rather some disjointed notes and a few chapters of an unfinished Dirk Gently novel…yeah, I should have read the blurbs more carefully.) Haven’t gotten to the Dirk material yet, may contain all kinds of insights. But I’m starting to like my ‘counting stones as a metaphor for the writing process’ idea more and more as a reason for it being in there.

Christopher Cerf attributes Adams books always being overdue to "a daunting blend of perfectionism and a terror of failing in his quest to put, as he liked to phrase it, ‘a hundred thousand words in a cunning order’ " Kate would be the publisher asking for the book, and then asking for it a second time later with a reason why he had to give it to her now, and he does, and thankfully, everything seems to turn out. (Apparently at least 3 of his publishers eventually had to resort to locking themselves in a room with him for days at a time to get him to finally finish the book he was working on.)

(tomato…as for payback, maybe she could get Thor to turn a certain Fender Precision bass into a pizza oven? :slight_smile: )

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What the hell? Are you trying to write your doctorate on this? Or are you simply obsessed? Or what?

It’s just a story. Written by an entertainer. Meant to entertain. (Well, and to make money.)

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Or perhaps Douglas Adams just looked through an herbal to find a few herbs supposed to be good for flesh wounds, in order to make Kate’s hoard of herbal bath gunk a valid plot point?

By the way Sempervivum is also called “hens and chicks” and you know Howard Bell had all those chickens delivered to his hotel room to look, like, all sinister and junk. And the musician’s kid was watching Bugs Bunny cartoons, some of which feature Foghorn Leghorn or Prissy the Hen, and they’re chickens!!And after the kid breaks Dirk Gently’s nose he goes to the cafe and the waiter mistakenly brings him an herb omelette, thereby linking chickens, herbs, Thor, and my sister’s dog who once snarfed down a whole pan of scrambled eggs when she wasn’t looking!!!

See how the further you go with it, the sillier it sounds?

I agree with Frank, and to paraphrase the MST3K theme song, “It’s just a book. You should really just relax.”

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Oh wow! I didn’t know about your sister’s dog and the scrambled eggs! It’s all falling into place now! :wink: No, it’s just something that bothered me the first time I read it, and every few years it pops up again. Don’t remember what brought it up this time…maybe the new Thor movie coming out. So I read back over a few relevant passages, do a few web searches…kind of like an old jigsaw puzzle I like the feel of pieces of, so I push 'em around for a while, see what answers time, other reading, web sites coming and going and SEO might have stirred up.

That’s where my last post came from…just a combination of search terms that also showed up on a site totally unrelated to the book, that also had some other interesting parallels beyond the words searched for. Playing around with a little Dirk Gently-style detecting to try to knock my thoughts out of the groove, see what it might lead to.

Just seems there was some mysterious stuff going on with the ending, hooked into my “man’s search for meaning in the universe”. The idea that it’s not a puzzle, or maybe a broken puzzle, just another by-product of an imperfect universe is fine too. Just a lens I use to look at the story, I guess.

(ran across a part in Salmon of Doubt mentioning how DA had once made huge point about there being exactly one banana on each plate at the beginning of a story, wouldn’t say why, said it would be revealed in the ending. When it wasn’t and they asked him about it, not only had he forgotten what the significance was supposed to be, he’d forgotten he’d put it in there.)

How about this, another question about how the book ends: Thor turns the eagle back into a jet, which roars out of Dirk’s house and kills the yuppies in their car. Just a total coincidence of timing for them to be exactly in front of his door on a deserted street? Thor seems totally oblivious to it, not connecting the sound and light from the explosion to what he’s just done.

Shortly before, Mr. Draycott had offered Dirk anything he wanted to make the problem go away, and Dirk had said he only wanted “just to see you dead.” Did Draycott somehow unwittingly grant Dirk his wish? Was it somehow caused by Odin, or the Guilt God? The fundamental interconnectedness of all things? Thrown in as a slightly implausible way for the bad guys to get their comeuppance without any of the good guys getting blood on their hands?

Partly just interested in the writing process too, where the ideas came from. They mentioned that when he was writing the first HHG series, all the jokes were about not having any money, and hanging around in pubs. After that was a success, the 2nd series was jokes about accountants and eating in fancy restaurants. Teatime of the Soul touches on themes of yuppie lawyers and advertising execs screwing people with contracts, homelessness, the role of gods in a world that doesn’t believe in them anymore, themes that DA had a lot of interest in.

As far as counting the stones go, in talking about evolution, he said “The connection lies in the counter-intuitive observation that complex results arise form simple causes, iterated many times over.” (with a mistake being made being similar to a mutation)

And as for my attitude towards all this, and to some degree why I’m doing it, a couple of other passages I ran across in Salmon of Doubt say it pretty well:

DA Talking about man creating artificial gods, saying even if they don’t exist, “when we create one and and then allow ourselves to behave as if there was one, all sorts of things happen that otherwise wouldn’t happen.” and

“He felt calm, he felt good, he felt able to meet with the wild, thrashing improbabilities that lie an atom’s depth beneath the surface of the narrated world, and to speak their language.”

I’m just looking for the hidden box of Hamdingers to get me off this ride, and trying to enjoy it in the meantime. Whaddaya think, sirs?

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You’re a good sport, Whaleo :smiley: Looking back, that last post of mine comes off a lot more snarly than I intended. It’s all good, we all read and think about things in our own way.

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These have the meat of it:

It’s also a task that only a god can do. No mortal could do it, so it must be being done in a godly way, not in a mortal, count each stone, way.

Yes. Kate knows something that Thor needs and it forcing him to acknowledge her importance by forcing him to talk about something that is obviously painful to him and forcing him to give her a secret. Of course, when he blows up and admits that his count was off, that counts as an acknowledgement, and a secret, just as well. Actually, since it embarasses him, too, it’s better.

And if you want a reference to another book, do you remember the bit where Ford and Arthur are being thrown out a Vogon airlock at the beginning of HHGG? That’s a throw-away bit, just there for entertainment, and somebody didn’t listen.

“You know,” said Arthur, “it’s at times like this, when I’m trapped in a Vogon airlock with a man from Betelgeuse, and about to die of asphyxiation in deep space that I really wish I’d listened to what my mother told me when I was young.”
[Ford Prefect:] “Why, what did she tell you?”
[Arthur:] “I don’t know, I didn’t listen.”

Notice that at the end of the first line, Ford and the Reader think that Arthur is referring to a specific bit of advice. It’s only when Ford asks that we find out that the advice is lost forever.

When Thor first talks about The Count, the line about losing count is a throw away at the end. Like someone driving to a wedding wondering if they really remembered to turn off the stove. The doubt doesn’t mean that the stove is still on any more than Thor’s comment means that he truly and completely lost count. He just has doubts.

He obviously completed his task to Odin’s satisfaction, or he’d still be in Wales, counting. So a count was completed and a count was reported. Thor’s doubts may have started years later. It’s only when Kate asks that we learn that The Count is lost forever. This follows the form of the airlock bit in HHGG exactly, only this time there’s half a book between the first line and the second two.

There are four forces in operation at the end of Dirk Gently, and the fourth is in operation an ALL Dirk Gently stories.

  1. Gods can do things. Thor snaps his fingers and the eagle turns into a jet with a pilot in the middle of ejecting.

  2. Things have unintended consequences. And when gods do things, the consequences can be big.

  3. Odin has messed with Thor’s god-magic, especially with his anger. Thor didn’t turn the lamp into a kitten. Thor got angry and Odin’s curse turned the lamp into a kitten.

  4. Everything that Dirk Gently predicts, no matter how flippantly or inconsequentially predicted, or how impossible the prediction, comes true. Remember when he met the pilot’s wife in the fortune telling tent? Every single prediction he made, including that her husband would return, came true by the end of the book.

This force drives Dirk mad. He believes in cause and effect and absolutely hates that this keeps happening to him. It’s also gotten him into a lot of trouble and he doesn’t trust it at all.

Have you re-read the book yet? If you do, you’ll find that most of the ending is foreshadowed well in advance. It happens fast, but the whole novel has set it up. Including the fact that it’s the Draycott’s fault. That was a definite #4. We’re also given enough information to come up with Kate’s solution on our own.