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?

AMAZE-BALLS. Douglas Adams's best work, hands down.

So last year I read all of The Hitchhiker's Guide books and loved them, though by the last one you could tell Adams didn't want to write them anymore. I adored Adams's humor and style, so I was excited to read the two Dirk Gently books. The first book suffered for me a little bit because over the first third of the book was very disconnected. But in this one you can see the connections through the various plotlines early on. In some of Adams's other books, the plot seems to jump around randomly, and while random-ness does abound here, it's much easier to see its greater purpose, and how everything fits together, which is why I found the story itself more engaging.

And then Adams brought in one of my favorite tropes- bringing fictional characters to life. Fictional characters from my favorite brand of mythology, Norse. And Thor was just SO Thor. I knew at that point I was going to love this.

Maybe the mystery itself wasn't as well built as the mystery in the last one, but honestly, I enjoyed the ride a hell of a lot more, the mystery didn't even matter that much. The characters were well-developed, and I liked Kate way more than any of Adams's other female characters. Dirk is still a jerk, of course, but a lot more sympathetic than in the last book, and I loved seeing his methods and the way he approached things.

Honestly the only complaint is that the ending is a bit rushed. In fact I went back a few pages to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Having heard things about how Adams approached deadlines, it makes me wonder if maybe he ran out of time, so just wrapped everything up quicker than originally planned. That or he felt the book was getting too long (it is longer than any of the Hitchhiker books, though on par with the first Dirk Gently). Or maybe he just wanted it to be like that. We'll never know.

Now I'm a million times sadder about him dying so young :( With this book being so original and so fun, I would have loved to see what else he could do, especially since he pretty much told everyone asking for more Hitchhiker's "fuck you" in Mostly Harmless. Douglas Adams's humor and style was such a gift and literature definitely needs more of it.

Adams addiction to mocking the every day mundane and inane just really tickles me. Like, every single time, I'm laughing at simple irreverence. I feel like Adams was the type of man that you really wanted to avoid slightly annoying because you would end up in one of his books, in a section about bistro math, or how no culture has the term "pretty as an airport."

LDTTS is a quick read, its hilarious, its probably the light-hearted thing that you are looking for that you dont even know you want.

Also, Britain, do you seriously not get pizza delivered? I mean, really? What century is this even?

A hot potato, a new fridge - hand delivered from the black market - and a severed head on a record player.
Dirk Gently is on a new assignment, or so it seems.
Is it really possible that a blast in Heathrow T2 is an "Act of God" or is it just a neat and come-in-handy clause in the insurance policy?
Is it true that you can´t get a pack of cigarettes after sunset anywhere in London and St Pancras Station resembles Valhalla?
Have the old Norse Gods sold out, or been caught in a hostile takeover?
And as if these questions are not properly holistic, what about the infamous man with the scythe and all the eagles?
The truth is out there with the Coca Cola vending machine and loads of fresh crispy white bedlinen of the absolutely best quality.
Please have your ticket and passport ready, or you will not be allowed on the plane.

This is for you who want to believe - to everyone else its 300 pages of psychobabble.

Douglas Adams is at his best when his writing is punchy, silly, and serving as an outline for his absurdism. Douglas Adams is not at his best here.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul just drags a little too much. There’s an overwhelming disjointedness and droning in this book that kept nagging at me as I read, and I found myself more than once wondering why I’m reading this. Adams isn’t particularly whimsical nor is he particularly succinct, and I just got bored waiting for something to happen, or even for him to do his typical “I am annoyed by This Thing in real life and I’m going to make fun of This Thing now.” Besides all that, I came out of this book pretty thoughtless, which is also unusual for an Adams read. It was funny and entertaining at times, but the first one was way, way better.

Sad that I’ve finally read the last of Adams' full novels and this is the note I end on.

Almost entirely, but not quite, unlike tea–I mean, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is no way easy way to say this, but despite ingredients that should be interesting, it just fails to work for me. However, unlike American Gods, which resembles it more than a bit, it is entirely more palatable and has 100% less offensive scenes, so there is that (I may have some trouble with statistics here). Nonetheless, because it is contains some Douglas Adamsisms that have stuck with me through the years, it still had moments of brilliance. Take his airport rule, for instance:

“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.”

This is true. There is nothing about any airport that is pretty. Most people there are indeed tired and cross, which is why when they discover that their plane has been delayed, or cancelled, or erupted in flames, they tend to overreact.



But an airport is just the beginning of roughly three separate plot lines, give or take; a young woman who is thwarted from a vacation to Oslo by a mysterious giant of a man and a fireball blowing up the check-in counter; Dirk Gently, a detective who is hired to protect an unethical producer; and a mysterious old man who would like to lay in bed and be gently catered to by a team of nursing staff. Dirk’s own adventures further degenerate into conflicts with a large eagle and a malevolent refrigerator. It’s all very puzzling mostly due to the narrative breaks and confused protagonists more than any real mystery on the part of the universe.

Having been a fan of Hitchhikers and frequent re-listener to Stephen Fry’s reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities between the lead characters. Dirk comes across like a slightly smarter version of Zaphod and Arthur, a strange mix of lucky and clueless. I don’t know that he ‘solves’ anything so much as stumbles unto the solution. The young woman, Kate, is quite literally, taken for a ride and had some of the general non-descriptiveness feel that I always got from Trillian.

Mostly, Tea-Time contains entertaining interludes and observations loosely connected by plot. To me, it works better in wacky unreal space adventures than in a mystery.

When I was young, I was an enormous fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I must have read it ten times. I bought whatever I could then lay my teenage hands on, written by Mr. Adams. But the Dirk Gently series never really gelled with me. Was it a window of interest? I sold off the first, but the title of the second was too, too appropriate to let go. For years I have thought of that saying, that mysterious four o’clock ennui of the soul (both am and pm) and thought that the book deserved a re-read on that alone, as well as notes on a driving technique which I’ve totally used (Note it works much better in rural areas and suburbs).

“Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but then again it was only a short distance, and he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his ‘Zen’ method of navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.”

Che non ci sia nemmeno un pizzico di buon senso (ma fantasia, comicità e orrore strisciante) risulta chiaro già dalla copertina (grazie Publishers Weekly), ma comunque non è abbastanza per preparare il lettore all'assurda possanza del delirio che attende tra le pagine. Memorabili i personaggi, tra cui uesto Dirk Gently, che oltre ad essere a mani basse il vincitore del premio per l'investigatore più strampalato ed inutile della storia della letteratura (l'ho già detto riguardo al libro precedente, vero?), riesce ad essere anche più assurdo e inadatto del suo omonimo della serie TV, il che è tutto dire.
Peccato che alla fine, la generosa dose di assenza di senso si sia ritorta contro Adams stesso ed ha tolto qualsiasi parvenza di possibilità per un'interpretazione semi-seria che si potesse fare sul finale o sul caso in se. In sostanza, non ci ho capito niente, e non sono nemmeno sicura che non facesse parte del piano...

This is the second book about Dirk Gently, the holistic private investigator. A seriously underestimated series (or what was to become a series, I'm sure).

In this second volume, Dirk is not really at his best. Something is wrong and he can't put his finger to it. To make matters worse, a very well off client, who promised to voluntarily pay for all sorts of quirks, is not just crazy as Dirk had thought, but ends up dead (money sure does seem to have a way of getting away from Dirk). Dirk's horoscope is even worse than usual but instead of taking the holistic approach, he chalks it up to an acquaintance of his being even more annoying than usual (that acquaintance is writing that particular horoscope). Add to that a weird incident at Heathrow airport (it had it coming if you ask me, I hate that place) and several encounters with fridges and a Coca-Cola vending machine and you get the usual silliness for which Douglas Adams was so famous for.

However, as is also signature DA, no matter how silly his characters or observations, they are also spot on. Like how airports are the worst places on Earth and how everyone is aggravated there. Or how the simplest things we're used to can seem paramount when living somewhere this simple thing isn't normal and certainly not simple (yes, I'm talking about the pizza deliveries - Paul, is it true that London doesn't have (or didn't have, in the 80s?) pizza delivering services, but that you have (had?) to pick the pizza up yourself instead?).

Throughout the book there are hilarious moments, classics of the comedy genre. Like when Kate is at Heathrow in the very beginning. Or when the eagle is in Dirk's office/apartment, he locks it in the kitchen, it repeatedly flies against the kitchen door in order to get out, then Dirk opens the door, the eagle doesn't notice in time and instead slams into the wall of the next room. Or how Kate often gets revenge for not having a pizza delivery service in London. In fact, her interaction with Thor in general. Or how Dirk gets his Jaguar from the mechanic (see below). Or how a certain couple got what they had coming at the very end of the book.
I was once again involuntarily attracting a lot of attention on my commute home when I burst out laughing on several occasions.

Here, for those who already know the book or want to laugh but not read the book (*gasps* shame on you all!):

He did at last understand that the mechanic was also claiming that a family of starlings had at some point in the past made their nest in a sensitive part of the engine's workings and had subsequently perished horribly, taking sensitive parts of the engine with them, and at this point Dirk began to cast about himself desperately for what to do.
He noticed that the mechanic's pick-up truck was standing nearby with its engine still running, and elected to make off with this instead. Being a slightly less slow and cumbersome runner than the mechanic he was able to put this plan into operation with a minimum of difficulty.
He swung out into the lane, drove off into the night and parked three miles down the road. He left the van's lights on, let down its tyres, and hid himself behind a tree. After about ten minutes his Jaguar came hurtling round the corner, passed the van, hauled itself to an abrupt halt and reversed wildly back towards it. The mechanic threw open the door, leapt out and hurried over to reclaim his property, leaving Dirk with the opportunity he needed to leap from behind the tree and reclaim his own.
He spun his wheels pointedly and drove off in a kind of grim triumph, ...

Or this little gem:
An "Act of God". Merely a chance, careless phrase by which people were able to dispose conveniently of awkward phenomena that would admit of no more rational explanation. But it was the chance carelessness of it which particularly appealed to Dirk because words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.

One thing was scary: the lawyer? The whole time I read the speech he gave Dirk I kept hearing Donald Trump (you know, the pronunciation, the repetition, "the greatest", ...)!

Nevertheless, despite such golden moments of comedy and the fact that Norse gods (my second favourite canon) were in this, I didn't love this as much as the first book. Maybe it was because Dirk wasn't on top of his game and I kept screaming at him internally that he had already noticed the significant bits, just subconsciously. Or because although there were sharp observations in this as well, they weren't as sharp or as numerous as in the first book. I don't know. However, those are also very strong emotions the book invoked and the writing style was once again top notch and very engaging, the characters all quirky and realistic though (or especially because) extremely whacky.

Before writing this review, I intended to "only" give this 4 stars to mark the difference between this and the previous volume. However, now that I've gathered my thoughts for this review, I think that would be an injustice - the first one was perfection from start to finish, this one was "only" but still excellent after all. Thus, I'm giving it 5 stars yet again, because I'm a solid Douglas Adams fangirl now and it is clear that I love Dirk Gently and am thoroughly saddened by how soon the series has had to come to an end.
I'll definitely finish this up by also reading the "3rd" (actually just a collection of what Douglas Adams had prepared for a third novel plus some other bits and pieces he might have turned into books had he not died much too soon).

This is one of my favorite books of all time. I will re-read or re-listen to it at least once a year and even though I know the story backwards and forwards, it never fails to entertain me.

Dirk Gently is still not on the level of Hitch-hiker's Guide, obviously, but this sequel is a better read than the first. Easier to follow, and very funny, the story is intriguing. I do wonder though, with the irreverent Norse gods hanging around, did this or American Gods come out first?

Lots of hilarious moments, though the pacing's not quite up to the level set in the first Dirk Gently book. The ending especially feels rushed - he spends a long time building up this fantastic web of complexity, and then rips it down with a climax and ending that together are barely longer than "But it all worked out okay in the end."

But, as a math student working through too many proofs right now, I really love Dirk's way of thinking! ...especially his reversal of Sherlock-Holmes-style logic:

"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' "
"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.' "
"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.
"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump, "your girl in the wheelchair--a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."

Words to live by. Stay open-minded, because there's a lot we don't know about.

I'm not sure whether this is the effect of not being jammed into half a train seat by someone twice the size of me, but The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul seemed less funny but more absorbing than the first book. It helped that it included Norse gods, I think. I had no idea that Douglas Adams had tangled with them.

On the other hand, I don't really think that as much seemed to happen, somehow. Less plates seemed to be spinning. I think that was a good thing for the narrative, but it seemed to make the second book different in tone from the first... (And then I wonder if that was just because at no point did I have to stuff my Kindle back into a bag and run to get off a train because I was about to miss getting off at the correct station. I suspect I'm more influenced by the circumstances in which I read books than I realise.)

So... on some levels, I enjoyed this more than the first book, and on some levels, less. Quite an odd feeling.

I do like the nine tenths of the subconscious being given over to penguins.