Time To Tell The Truth About HHGTTG (spoilers)

Cafe Society
1

In antipation of the new film version of Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy I’ve recently re-read the books. One after the other, in sequence, all five. And now I think the truth has to be told. Straight up, no flinching.

They’re not very good. In fact, some could even be said to be very poor.

The crux of the matter is that Douglas Adams, great ideas man, great radio-series man, great gags man, couldn’t write novels for toffee. To summerise the five;

The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The best of the bunch. Introduces some revolutionary and much copied concepts, displays a unique and refreshing humour. All the jokes that need to be done are done, and for the most part it works as a self-contained novel with a plot that mostly makes sense using characters you can care about.

The Restaurant At the The End Of The Universe. Not too bad. But some of the characters are wearing a bit thin and betraying the fact that they started out as one shot gags that don’t travel well beyond their first scene. All the same, Adams does manage to pull off a sensible conclusion to the book where everything has come full circle. He really, really should have stopped there.

Life, The Universe and Everything. Oh dear. It all goes badly wrong. A plot based on puns about cricket, for Og sake. It’s the bastard offspring of the universe’s dullest game combined with the lowest form of humour. Features an elongated gag about that ancient third-rate comedian’s stalwart; working out the restaurant bill.

So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish. A nothing book. About nothing. Nothing happens, signifing nothing. A few ideas from previous books are re-hashed and Adams takes a stab at writing, gulp, a love story. Unfortunately, as is apparent from their near total absense in all the preceding books, Adams can’t write female characters. Nothing works and the conclusion is … well who knows, it all kind of just fizzles out.

Mostly Harmless. Better, but only in that it’s an attempt to put the mess of the preceding two book to rights. The afore-mentioned love interest is surgically removed from the story without so much as a second thought or wave goodbye. A pointless and irritating new (female) character is introduced and gets to do and say all the things that would have been much more poignant and significant from Arthur Dent, who meanwhile is going through all the same dull moves he got stuck with in the third book. A blatant and unexplicable Duex Ex Machina is parachuted in and everyone dies at the end. Somehow the foretelling of Arthur Dent’s death in the third book, which was said couldn’t happen before an event, gets changed to “will happen on the event”.

So, can anyone offer and excuse for Books 3-5?

2

Er, that’s any excuse for Books 3-5.

3

I liked them. But then I never heard the radio series, and I was too young to fully appreciate the tv series’

4

Adams was a radio script-man with a penchant for the bizarre.

HHGTTG was conceived originally as a radio series, pure and simple.

Later made into a novel and a record, which were mutually inconsistent with each other and with the original radio series.

Having discovered the novel first, I have a yen for its particular plot thread more than the radio series, but many feel the radio series is the definitive version. I find it to succumb too often to the mid-80s penchant for layering so many sound effects on a voice just to show you can, that you can no longer understand what they are saying. Heard snatches of the record, I believe considered the weakest of the bunch.

Later, there was a TV series. Ghastly. All the parts were horrbily miscast, IMO, with the possible exception of Simon Jones as Arthur Dent.

In the meantime, Adams had apparently discovered while novelizing and re-arranging the radio series for book form that he liked to write books.

Third novel appeared, in order to wrap up where the second novel left off. Too self-referential. A lot of rehash of old concepts, and the new ones were too tangential. Interesting, however, in demonstrating his ability to take complete throw-away lines from earlier works and turn them into whole sub-plots.

Fourth book appeared. Complete departure, no congruity with the rest of the series. Adams had fallen in love by this point, and erroneously thought we’d like to read all about it.

Fifth book eventually appeared. Adams took a long time to squeeze this one out, and its plot is accordingly constipated. Formerly familiar characters are unrecognizable. He obviouly wrote it to make people stop asking him when he was going to write it.

5

It’s true, the books aren’t very good.

I laughed maniacally when I first read them (except for So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish, and Mostly Harmless,) but then, I was a teenager, and laughed out at parts of the Truly Tasteless Jokes books, too.

I haven’t been able to re-read the Hitchhiker’s books since I was twenty-something.

The radio shows, on the other hand, hold up perfectly, and I still go back to them every couple of years. (I have the radio series and the LP adaptations of the novels-- the LPs are good, too, but they’re quite different, omitting material that was written by Adams’ co-writer.)

I was so happy to read that the radio series’ surviving cast has been assembled to record adaptations of the last three books for Radio Four. Joy.

6

He said himself that he was having “a bad year” when he wrote it, and it really did come out in the book, didn’t it? He was working on a sixth book partially to make amends for a conclusion that didn’t do the series justice.

Some of the things you say are true - yes, some of the jokes are old, but I’ll give that a pass because the twists on them can be pretty unique - but I first read the books probably seven or eight years ago and I still enjoy flipping to random pages and re-reading whatever bit I land on. (I haven’t heard the radio shows, but I’ve read the scripts and for the most part, the books seemed funnier.) Maybe I’ll feel differently at some point in the future. There are some obvious jokes and the rest of it, but it’s still funny to me, and I still have a special place for it.

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Marley23, you really must hear the radio shows. Reading the scripts won’t give you much insight into their genius. Adams’ great gift was writing to performers’ strengths.

Half of the humour is in the performance. It was written for radio, and radio is far more than words on a page being read out loud. The narrative bits contain funny ideas, but when read in Peter Jones’ dry deadpan, (as they were intended to be) they’re debilitatingly funny. Many of the parts were written for specific performers, and when you leave out the performance, you lose the intended humour.

The books really don’t compare well with the radio series’ at all.

8

I bought and read “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” about three years ago and loved it… I was literally convulsing with laughter every page and a half. Because of that, when I saw all five books in one compendium for cheap, I rushed to buy it and then sat down to read the rest but couldn’t. While HHGTTG was hysterical, Restaurant was less so and I just stopped reading the book about halfway through Life, The Universe, and Everything out of sheer boredom. It works as a one time book but as an entire series, it falls apart quickly.

I don’t think I’ll ever bother reading So Long and Thanks for all the Fish or Mostly Harmless.

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I confess, I just didn’t like them. There were a few occasions of true cleverness, but msotly I thought it was simply silly - and not in a good way.

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I do want to hear them, I just haven’t been able to track them down.

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Adams often said in interviews that he was a dreadful procrastinator and that the later novels were usually written in airplanes over the course of a week when they were months past due. And when you read them you can believe that this is the literal truth. Not the way to produce memorable prose.

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One point about Life, The Universe & Everything is that Adams originally wrote the Krikkit plot as a script for Doctor Who. It never got made, so he recycled the ideas for Hitchhiker. This is why the people act out of character so often.

I thought it was good, but weaker than the first two,.

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But there was no change. If something can’t happen before an event, then it’s allowed to happen on or after the event.

As I was Googling, I discovered a nitpick I hadn’t even considered. Agrajag’s original line referring to Arthur’s death apparently talks about him being “on Stavromula Beta.” But Stavromula Beta is a nightclub, so you wouldn’t say you were “on” it, you would say you were “at” or “in” it.

None of this really impacts the fact that it was not such a great book, though.

14

Surely there wasn’t any foretelling of Arthur’s death. IIRC, Whatsisname was trying to kill Artheur, in revenge for all the times Arthur killed him. Whatsisname metions the time on Stavromula Beta when an assasin tried to shoot Arthur, he ducked and the bullet hit Whatsisname. The point is, whatsisname can’t kill Arthur until after this event has happened. There was no prediction that he would die, even then.

15

Exactly. It was a established that Arthur hadn’t been to Stavromula Beta yet, but he must do at some time in his life. Therefore he couldn’t die before visiting it.

This does not mean he would die there, just that he couldn’t die prior to this. But somehow by the fifth book it becomes established that Stavromula Beta means Dent’s doom. I know that consistency isn’t exactly HHGTTG’s strong point, it just annoyed me that Dent, usually a stickler for such things, and having more reason to be so than usual, just accepted this.

But I’m glad to see that others agree about the books. Douglas Adams does seem to attract hero worship among many, but here’s proof that he had his weaknesses. I have the original TV series on video, recorded when aired, and I actually thought that this version was pretty good, better than the radio version. Of course, the TV version is slightly different from the book, which is slightly different from the radio version. It can get a bit confusing.

16

Man. I’ve been sayin this for YEARS!

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I first read the first 4 books when I was between - 13 and 15, I think… maybe all when I was 13 thinking about it… possibly all 5 even… (see the inconsistencies are catching )…

it took me a few reads to fully understand what was going on in Hitchhikers - - but I’ve re-read the entire “trilogy” several times since then and enjoyed them evertime…

I just bought the Dirk Gently omnibus… and I remember liking the first one, and not liking the second one as much…

what I found on re-reading (I’m still in the midst of Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul ) is that they are not very well constructed stories - - Dirk doesn’t even get introduced until well into the first book…

I intended to re-read teh entire Hitchhikers again - afterwards - - so I’ll report back with how I feel about them now when I have…

18

Me too. I read (some of) 'em waaaay back when and found ‘em mildly amusing. How they became this cultish thing with slavishly devoted fans, I never understood. And I thought the miniseries was mediocre at best. I am curious to hear the radio show tho’…

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The Primary and Secondary Phases have been available on CD for years. The Tertiary Phase is currently airing on BBC R4 - the first two eps have aired, but there are ways of downloading them from the web (and indeed, the whole series).

It’s also worth looking at the TV series, just to see the superb animations accompanying the Guide entries. My personal favourites are the cross-section of Eccentrica Gallumbits’ erogenous zones and (of course) the Babel Fish sequence. Most of the radio cast also appear in the TV series; the only major recasts are David Dixon replacing Geoff McGivern as Ford and Sandra Dickinson stepping rather badly into Susan Sheridan’s shoes as Trillian.

20

Back in the day, when I was commuting a fair bit, some kind soul scheduled the HHGTTG radio play for the morning drive. I think it saved my sanity.

Unfortunately, Adams could not sustain the originality, and his works did not transfer well to print. The decline continued through to Mostly Harmless, which should have been flattened by a whale.