**Rating: 3.5/5**

The BBC audiobook dramatization was awesome! So glad I found it.

Unfortunately, Adams' sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency isn't as tightly-written as its predecessor. On the sentence level, Adams is still writing furiously funny jokes, but The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul ends up feeling like first-class humor wrapped loosely around second-class plot and characters. Adams has been accused of writing punchlines rather than plots, and it shows in this book perhaps more so than anywhere else. I also thought the book's flow suffered greatly in places, with important scenes not having enough space devoted to their development (especially in the last few pages, such as the Valhalla scene). In addition, Dirk Gently's "fundamental interconnectedness" approach to investigation--where everything is important because it's linked to everything else--is still present here, but the linked items don't line up as neatly as they did in the first book. I also found the conclusion lacking: at the end of Dirk Gently's..., I said "Fantastic!" aloud to the room around me; at the end of The Long, Dark... I turned the page and, when there was nothing else to read, said aloud, "That's it?" So: five stars for humor, but minus two for poor plot and flow.

I love Douglas Adams but this book missed the mark a wee bit for me. Although the stuff with the gods was fun I'm not sure how much help Dirk was and the ending was a little abrupt. But otherwise, there were some funny parts.

It's come time to revise my review of this book, because I re-read it recently, and yes, i had a pretty good time with it, but still, I have to report one of those sad moments that sometimes happen in life, when you try something you thought was great in childhood and find yourself kind of crushed to discover it's not really as fine as you remembered.

Essentially, my perspective on the two Gently novels has completely reversed since I first read them as a twelve-year-old (or whatever it was). I now see that all those people who said that the first book was better, smarter, etc, were right all along. Don't get me wrong, this is still a fun book with some amusing insights about "life, the universe, and everything", but now I see that there's a good reason that every time I tried to re-read this book, i ended up stopping about half-way through.

You know Neil Gaiman? His books Neverwhere and American Gods were really popular and maybe you've heard of them. I always thought there had to be a Douglas Adams influence on him somehow. But imagine if both of those popular books of his largely consisted of people wandering around commenting on the absurdity of everyday situations, and then in the last twenty pages he threw in some weird stuff about gods or aliens or something. I said in my review of the first novel that this technique of not-getting-to-the-point actually worked rather well, but after reading them back to back in 2017, now I have to say I'm not so sure it's good here. Almost everything I thought was funny and memorable about The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul: the kid and the TV, the visit to the hospital and the Dustin Hoffman Repeater, the trick with the Jaguar and the mechanic's truck, was just a digression.

The big thing I came away with this time is that this is a deeply cynical book. Our main point of view character in the first novel was the musicologist/programmer Richard Macduff. He was a likable guy who was passionate about something. now, here we have an American woman named Kate, who is the sort of person who calls up pizza places that don't deliver just so she can get outraged about them not delivering when she asks them to. yeah, I admit that when I was twelve I thought this was really funny, because it was like something I would have done. But she doesn't really seem passionate about much, and in the end, it's suggested that she's going to use Odin in much the same way as the sleazy lawyer and his wife did. At least I think that's suggested. I'm not entirely clear on it, and Adams might not have really wanted me to be. Despite there being a chapter dedicated to Kate undressing and taking a bath, I wasn't all that won over by her this time.

The good news is that Dirk is in this book a lot more, and he's pretty cool. Not exactly the same mysterious, bombastic and questionable character as in DGHDA, but you get to know him better and, despite doing some pretty outrageous things, I think he's ok and understand why Adams was working on a third book; why there were two TV series ostensibly about him, and so on. I'm sad that the book didn't actually include Dirk making a stand for and defending the old ways of the gods. That speec from the lawyer, a killer villain's speech if I've ever heard one, is sort of the climax of the book. Maybe if this were Doctor Who, Adams' old alumnus, the Doctor would have gone up there and made a strident declamation for justice and understanding. Hell, I could imagine Tom Baker or Peter Capaldi doing it! But this isn't Who and I guess Dirk is an entirely different sort of character. Still, the fact taht there was nothing good after this point, and that the entire excursion to Asgard just seemed empty and perfunctory, annoys me.

This book still has something to say about what it means to "sell out", and how tragic it is. It was probably important for me to read it when I did. It's still funny and sharp. It just feels a bit empty, now, and even possibly a little nasty in an unpleasing way.

For the sake of posterity, here's my original review, written at a different time and with a different impression: one with a nostalgic glow for what the book at one time meant to me.

I've got to admit that, while the Hitchhiker books were fantastic for me as a youngster, they didn't stand up so well and I didn't really have the urge to re-read them. Perhaps it's because I was nearly obsessed upon my initial discovery and immersed myself in the bizarre worlds and antics of the characters so much that I "burned out", or perhaps, and this seems more likely to me, science fiction comedy is ultimately not really my style. Yes, I'm a fairly big SF fan, but I've always felt that unless we're talking about something absolutely timeless, comedy works best when highlighting and satirising the absurdity of everyday, "realistic" people and concerns. This is exactly what Adams does in The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, which is undoubtably his most engaging and reletnelsssly funny book from my current perspective.

In the first book, Adams didn't focus on Dirk Gently a great deal, and he remained a sort of mysterious and slightly dodgy figure. This story's largely about him, and a great deal is told from his point of view. We learn that he's pretty much a loser, lazy and that the only reason he has clients at all is that all the lunatics seem to be attracted to his pitch. And yet, his "methods" often seem to bare fruit, and while it gives him business, it confounds his sense of reality and place in the world. The beginning of this book is almost a perfect parody of those old private investigator novels...except here Dirk's sleeping late in his dingy flat and missing all the action, showing up in the middle of a police investigation and hilariously having his nose broken by a TV-magnetised, pot-noodle-slurping kid. It just gets crazier from there, and while apart from a few disparate strands seemingly waving around in the breeze there doesn't appear to be a plot for the first two-thirds of the novel, it sure is entertaining to watch Dirk bumble and wander around antagonising people, trying to avoid the hot potato and sleazy lawyers, getting his car smashed up and then coming up with the perfect scheme to get a recalcitrant mechanic to fix it (this was so genius I really wanted to try it myself), and finally through a series of bizarre events meeting the expatriate New Yorker Kate shector, just in time to get the story moving, sort of.

Kate's an all right character, too. Adams has made her seem fairly real without plunging into farce, a difficult temptation for him to avoid, I'm sure. Her own exploits are about as entertaining as Dirk's, too. I particularly loved the visit to the psychiatric hospital and the Dustin Hoffman telepath (no, I won't say anymore about that, but hint: this is probably much funnier if you get the audiobook read by Douglas Adams himself). Also, she's lucky enough to have Thor as a houseguest!

Yes, Thor! The Norse gods come into this, and they're all bastards and sell-outs, except for Thor, who just wants to go home and to hell with this crappy modern world. I really liked Thor in this book; his bewilderment was endearing beyond belief and Adams did a great job of making him the same grandiose, boastful god of lore and yet imbuing him with a sense of tragedy and loss, while also allowing us to laugh at him.

SO yes, it's a light-hearted, glorious romp that still contains a core of intelligence and, of course, high wit. at twelve when i first read the book I really appreciated what Adams had to say about selling out, in particular, and guess what? I still do. Hail Thor!

"That's it? But... but... there has to be more!" - my reaction when I turned what was sadly the last page of the book. This was followed by a wild turning of pages, flipping it over a few times, tossing it in a corner and staring at it angrily. I had waited patiently, smiled and laughed at the perfect times, even nodded and exclaimed, "Classic Douglas Adams!" when the occasion demanded. In short, I had been the perfect tea-time guest. And I was given no tea!

While all the typical humour and wit remains intact (“Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren't up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up.”), the promise that the first book holds is pretty much reduced to mere flashes. The plot is not as well-knit and leaves you hanging by many threads with either an 'Eh?' or a 'Meh'. The fundamental interconnectedness is also not as interconnected as what one would expect.

And oh! Dirk Gently is largely missing as his self-aware, theory-spouting, 'intellectual' avatar. Instead, he's busy playing cacth-up with life, while searching the entirety of London for a single cigarette, and his sole contribution to the entire affair seems to be his guilt-ridden refrigerator. I did consider that it was a rather sad take on how people change with circumstances -- life seemed to have grabbed our man, Cjelli by the collar and shaken all the change from his pockets. But no! I shall have none of that! I'd rather have the old nonchalant Gently, signing off his bills with a badass 'Saving the universe: no charge."

That said, it pleasantly surprised me to read some very poignant lines that just for a moment seemingly broke the character-author barrier. I quite believe it was Douglas directly speaking through these lines:

“In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages.

So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other?

But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.”

In short, if you're having a cross day, it's more than safe to pick this one up. But if you've already read the first one, it might leave you a wee bit disappointed. Oh well, at least the credentials on the back cover weren't lying...

Keine 220 Seiten und man muss unglaublich beim Hören aufpassen, was allerdings auch an den nahtlosen Übergängen der vielen Handlungsebenen liegen mag. Vielleicht hätte man das anders machen können aber so schrieb Douglas Adams nun mal. Trotz alledem ist es eine unglaublich unterhaltsame Geschichte voll britischem Humor.
Aber was hatte sie mit Tee zu tun?
Kaffee ja; definitiv viel mit Bettlaken aber Tee?

Bonkers

This book makes up for being less bizarre than the first by being much more comprehensible. That being said, it is still crazy and fun.

Basic Plot: Dirk Gently investigates an "act of God" that leaves him wondering which god was behind it.

Not as funny as the first book, but definitely just as interesting, especially with the addition of the Asgardian gods. This book may have been my first real introduction to that pantheon, and colored my reading of a lot of books as I expanded my literary knowledge. I think I need to re-read this one soon.

Kate misses her flight to Oslo then the check-in counter at the airport explodes... Meanwhile Dirk Gently eventually goes to meet a client and stumbles upon his head revolving on a turntable... Does this sound strange? Actually there's much humor involved and a bunch of goings on with the gods too...

After the surprisingly disappointing first novel, I was relieved to find this more palatable though far from the classic Adams-esque work that I remember it being.
There is more to love here, Dirk Gently is actually in the novel most of the time, unlike the first book. He feels more comfortable and things are generally funnier and move along at a nice pace. The story itself is almost as wanting as that of the previous novel. There's some stuff about Thor and Odin being mad at him or Thor being mad at Odin. There's some goblin or something and a weird contract between Odin and some other villain or something who shows up literally in the last few pages. So, story-wise it isn't very good. In fact, the story is pretty abysmal. The stars above are recognition that it is, in fact, a very funny book in places and Dirk Gently a promising and bizarre protagonist for a kind of latter-day PoMo Sherlock Holmes sort of series.
Would I recommend this over Hitchhiker's? No way.