Bonkers

"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...

Sometimes, even if you’re Thor, it’s very hard to get to Oslo.

At least, if you’re Thor in a universe where humans created gods, and the gods need ongoing worship to exist. See generally http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php.... This book might have been my introduction to the idea that humans created gods in our own image. And the pathos of being a being created to be worshipped once the worship stops.

It also may have been the first book I read where a lawyer and an advertising executive got together to do something really nasty to some naïve . . . being. . . using a cleverly written contract. That might have had some impact on how I approach questions of substantive unconscionability in contract cases. Hm.

Anyhoo, a lot of the plot happens off the page in this book and must be inferred from what happens. Some of it – like why an eagle keeps attacking Dirk, who is not much of a Sisyphean figure and why Thor travels around with his own Coke vending machine – are explained at the end, more or less, but others – like why Odin’s man servant has a giant green monster with a scythe and why Dirk’s refrigerator ended up there – are left as exercises for the reader. As well as what exactly Dirk did to keep a particular contract clause from being enforced . . . though Thor finding his inner Thor-ness rendered some of that moot.

Dirk Gently of this book is much less like The Doctor of Doctor Who than the Dirk Gently of the Holistic Detective Agency. He’s drifting towards Susan Sto Helit of Discworld (Death’s adopted granddaughter and more than a little bit eldritch herself, despite her stark skepticism of the supernatural) and Shadow of American Gods (though Shadow lacks Dirk’s lively imagination). A more-or-less human character who can see the divine drama, be profoundly moved by it, and figure out the trick of it. I would have loved to have seen where DNA took it.

It is also, quietly, freaking hilarious.

I don't exactly know how to rate this because on the one hand it was entertaining... I read it quite quickly on a holiday since it was the perfect sized book to fit in my pocket. I also really like Douglas Adams books. I love his brand of chaotic sci-fi adventure about wacky characters.

... But on the other hand, this one just didn't quite click with me. I hadn't read the first Dirk Gently book (only watched the TV series), so perhaps it's just that I'm less familiar with it? Or perhaps it's just that it was a little too chaotic. A little too random. A little too quirky for quirky's sake? The story felt like it was going places then ended fairly abruptly within the last 6 chapters, and the 'big resolution' left me with more questions than answers.

Or maybe I'm the one that has changed since reading The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Five Parts as a kid. What was excellent to me as a young reader now feels mildly annoying. So maybe it's just a me problem?

A friend asked what the book had to do with teacups, since there's a large tea set on the front cover, and having read the whole thing I have to say I have no idea. As far as I remember, nobody drinks tea (there's some coffee in one scene), and none of it takes place at tea time.

Overall, 2/5. I wouldn't necessarily recommend this one but I absolutely would recommend just about anything else Douglas Adams has written. I will go back and seek out the first Dirk Gently book just for closure's sake, and perhaps it'll prompt me to update this review when I have more *gestures vaguely* context. Perhaps.

This book is grittier than its predecessor "Dirk Gently's hollistic detective agency" , though it follows similar themes.
We follow Dirk as he tries to solve the murder of his former client, (who he presumed to be insane, as the man was raving about a monster with a scythe coming to kill him- but was actually very very sane) as it turns out, he was actually being chased by a monster with green eyes and a scythe.
Dirk discovers this when the police find his client's head revolving ungracefully on a record, stuck singing the words “don't pick it up, don't pick it up…”
Throughout one day Dirk has his nose broken, tries to find cigarettes, gets chased by a giant Eagle, loses his secretary to “an act of God”, (she gets turned into a coca cola machine), uncovers a conspiracy concerning a hot potato and how his client is inexorably involved, follows some homeless people to Valhalla, has his street destroyed by the eagle that turns out to actually be a fighter jet, and finally gets rid of his old fridge- which unfortunately turns into a new god. (But fortunately, he kills the monster with the scythe and its accomplice)

The charm and humour of this book series is due to Dirk’s belief in 'Inter-connectedness of all things', which always turns out to be true.
Dirk improbably meets people involved in the case around him and believes in the ridiculous, and since life is utterly ridiculous, he's always a step ahead of everybody else.
This quote pretty much sums up his methods:

n  n    "The impossible did not bother him unduly.
If it could not be possibly done, then obviously, it had been done impossibly. The question was how?"n  n

This makes Dirk a very enjoyable character to follow through his misadventures and exploits.
However, as with the first book I will need to look up the synopsis of the book to clear up some unexplained questions I have, as the writing style is clever and reveals and explanations are often buried confusingly within the book.
This book is definitely not as good as the first one, I felt that it was all building up to something good, but the explanation was so confusing that it fell flat.
It was funny, though. I did laugh out loud several times.

my review of the hitchiker's guide to the galaxy

⭐️3.2
14+
cws: violence (descriptions of bloody wounds/injuries, murder etc)
su1cide references (short scene: they meet an old woman who wants to off herself, but it's very satirical/dark comedy- esque.)

i really love douglas adams's writing. not much else to say!

Sad to say this is the first Douglas Adams book I did not enjoy. It felt rushed, everything happening too fast and without giving the reader time to care about any of it.

Der zweite Band ist auf jeden Fall etwas leichter zu durchschauen, wobei am Ende wieder viel miteinander verknüpft wurde auf die typische Douglas Adams Art. Manchmal würde ich mir wünschen, dass diese Erklärungen etwas länger wären, da es auch hier wieder sehr konfus wurde. Aber das Buch hat mir trotzdem gut gefallen. Wer den Erzählstil von Douglas Adams aus Per Anhalter durch die Galaxis mag, wird auch an den Dirk Gently Romanen Freude finden.

The second volume is definitely a little easier to understand, although a lot of things were linked together at the end in the typical Douglas Adams way. Sometimes I wish these explanations were a bit longer, as it got quite confusing again. But I still enjoyed the book. Anyone who likes the narrative style of Douglas Adams from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy will also enjoy the Dirk Gently novels.

Immer noch sehr lustig, aber ganz ehrlich: ich habs nicht so richtig verstanden.

I rate The Long Dark Tea-Time of the soul by Douglas Adams a 3/5 or 60%.

That’s not to say I didn’t enjoy this book, it’s just hard for me not to compare it to the other work I’ve read from Adams which was, in my opinion, much better (hitchhikers).

Dirks philosophy of *holistic* investigation is on full display in this book as he goes through the most strange and mind bending journey to solve his case. He believes that everything that ever happens in his life is all inner connected. Connecting those pieces, no matter how strange they may be, is the true case that he has to solve.

While I do love this premise, and the book did swing back around at the end, the round about that Adams took us on was far too cumbersome in my personal opinion. Adams humor shined through again (I can’t lie, some chapters were so stupidly funny) but I think the tangents that he went on in this book made me loose interest at points. I found myself searching for the main plot at times, and maybe I shouldn’t do that with an Adams book as he likes to take the story wherever he pleases and doesn’t like the reader to guess what’s coming next, but for me I would have liked to stay on topic a little more .

It's a great book, but ultimately I doubt I'll reread it. I love all of the ideas and there's something about how Douglas Adams constructs sentences that is just brilliant, but it's just missing something of the spark that Hitchhiker's has

Entertaining, but not as good as the first one.