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Title: Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams ISBN: 0-345-41877-8 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 01 February, 2000 Format: Mass Market Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.52 (134 reviews)
Rating: 4
Summary: oh my...
Comment: This fifth and final installment in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy is simply amazing. While it seems that a lot of people weren't satisfied with it, I am quite the exception. The tone of the humor in this book (as with SLATFATF) is much darker than the earlier books, but that's just fine by me. I prefer a little darkness.
While this book returns somewhat more to the zaniness of the first three books (at least in comparison to the fourth book), it is not entirely wacky. It seems that this book is, in many ways, quite "fannish," there to please fans of the series with cheap thrills and tips of the hat (one example would be the return of the Vogons, which I don't exactly think anybody was clammoring for). However, in the midst of all this, Adams tells a wonderfully adventurous story that ties together in an ending that will leave you stunned and breathless (I'll try not to spoil it, but it's reminiscent of something that happenned in the first book, HG2G).
The worst part of the book is that Fenchurch just disappears... literally! And we never see Arthur deal with it! Still, Adams provides us with yet another wonderful character to help reveal the human side of Arthur....
I think it is a wonderful, if unexpected and somewhat unnecessary, end to the series. Trillian returns (although thankfully Zaphod doesn't), but Marvin is depressingly absent. Oh and remember Agrajag, from LTUAE? Well, there's a wonderful tie to that whole thing that you just can't miss. For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, go read LTUAE and then read this and laugh along with me. Read it. You'll be blown away.
Rating: 4
Summary: HHGTTU
Comment: *WARNING: CONTAINS SPOILERS!!*
I loved all of the books,thought the ending to mostly harmless certainly hurt (when I read books, I imagine them to be alive. In addition, I seem to have developed some sort of curse that makes certain that each and every favourite character I ever decide on will die by the end of the book/series/whatever. So Ford dying in the end certainly didn't help my opinion of this book).
A lot of people have brought up questions regarding continuity and loopholes with regards to the ending, and I think that this was intentional - My GUESS, is the Douglas Adams purposely ended the book the way he did to be finished and done with it, but to also give people who couldn't deal with the death a simple way out of having to.
I cannot deal with the death ( ;) ) so I am pretending in my mind that Ford and the others simply hitch-hiked their way out of the situation, and continued on their way, while sorting out Fenchurch, Zaphod, Trillian/Tricia, and Random along the way, and, everyone did indeed live happily ever after.
It could happen.
Rating: 4
Summary: Action, humour, SF satire and post-modern philosophy
Comment: Always a lovely read - Adams is very user friendly. He seems to almost have his own genre of which he and Pratchett are the leading exponents. I can't say I laughed out loud too often (although the picture of a drunken Zaphod sticking a birdcage over his second head and badly pretending to be a pirate is hilarious), but it was a very pleasant ride - even if the conclusion is surprisingly bleak for what feels like a light comedy. Like Pratchett (and there are so many 'like Pratchett's, although that's probably in the wrong comparative order) Adams throws in some agnostic themes with his humour, although here the ultimate meaninglessness of life is treated a little less whimsically.
It's an interesting hotchpotch of action (and cutting between various cliff-hanger scenes), philosophy, stand-up comic perspectives of the everyday, domestic sit-com, satirical SF, and Douglas' own pleasure in blithely hurling his characters through six impossible things before breakfast. The plot is surprisingly coherent although occasionally incidental.
I still would almost be surprised if Adams didn't cite Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 as a thematic and stylistic influence. Here he lets his sensible and considerate astrologer state the theme that it doesn't matter so much what you believe in ('truth' is irrelevant), but you need something as a structure, a lens, to enable you to live satisfactorily. Adams unsurprisingly explains this much better:
"I know that astrology isn't a science ... of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis ... The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people."
'Discuss', huh.
Yet another author struggles to reconcile loss of faith in major, particularly religious, concepts of truth with the inner conviction that there are important, good and beautiful things all around - that it's not all just meaningless.
And it is a struggle, as in the climax (spoiler warning) Trillian explains to her traumatised daughter who desperately wants to know who she is, where her home is, where she 'fits':
This is not your home ... You don't have one. We none of us have one. Hardly anyone has one anymore. The missing ship I was just talking about. The people of that ship don't have a home. They don't know where they are from. The don't even have any memory of who they are or what they are for. The are very lost and very confused and very frightened.
Yeah, ha ha, good one Douglas - hardly Wodehouse light humour. Human condition anyone? I wonder if Adams and Pratchett self-consciously have wanted to be taken 'seriously'? I could see that it could be frustrating for them to be dismissed as merely lightweight because they're so popular. They often contain more articulate thought than works by more academic writers, and shouldn't be seen as lesser merely because they happen to also be very good at amusing and entertaining (quite the opposite). That being said, their books should also come with a flyleaf caveat: "Warning - strong post-modern agenda permeates the following jokes".
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Title: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams ISBN: 0345391810 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ISBN: 0345391802 Publisher: Ballantine Books Pub. Date: 27 September, 1995 List Price(USD): $7.50 |
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Title: Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams ISBN: 0671742515 Publisher: Pocket Books Pub. Date: 15 February, 1991 List Price(USD): $7.99 |
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Title: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams ISBN: 159007257X Publisher: New Millennium Audio Pub. Date: May, 2002 List Price(USD): $39.95 |
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Title: The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time by Douglas Adams ISBN: 1400045088 Publisher: Harmony Books Pub. Date: 07 May, 2002 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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