3.5

As a fan of Douglas Adams, you have a high appetite for the craziness and near impossible randomness. The book is ok on humor and creativity but I felt let down as a complete book.

Unbeatable premise - A bombing at an airport with no casualty deemed (rightly so) "An act of God". The immortal Gods have entered into a contract with a lawyer and advertiser (humans) and humans have extracted their pound of flesh by taking away the Godliness. Thor who is the only God who is still trying to care, in the process gets banished. Throw in an angry eagle, a coca-cola vending machine, an unopened refrigerator and a hot-potato. Gently ends up solving the case for 'Gods sake'.

Neil Gaiman apparently shared this as an inspiration for his American Gods. You accept Dirk Gently, Holistic private investigator, who believes in not eliminating the impossible and believes in the basic interconnectedness of things. But the book, seems like a well laid book wrapped up in a hurry. The last chapters which had all the action were abrupt as if he was working against a deadline.

All in all, the book was a twilight book of Douglas Adams - neither here nor there and a little glum.

This used to be one of my favorite books when I was 18 (that was more than a few years ago *cough* thirty something *cough*). I was definitely going through a ‘I love everything Douglas Adams’ phase at the time and while I still like this book because sometimes the ridiculousness of the plot and randomness of how everything happens is still so much fun I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did back then.

There are some great things in this. There is Dirk who is a funny and severely quirky character who is often very creative in his role as a holistic detective. I really do laugh at the odd way in which he sees the world and interacts with it.

n  “He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” 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.”

“When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping at the lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.” n

While if I met him in real life I’d probably like to deck him, in the story I find his antics and musings completely fascinating and sometimes hilarious.

Some of the story seemed more like just random events to me this time through and while situationally funny I wasn’t sure how it all moved together sometimes. Thor having performance issues was entertaining as was Kate trying to figure out why right after she left the ticketing gate at Heathrow Airport did it blow un and what is with all the penguins in her subconscious.

n  “Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.”n

Adams wrote some wonderful jokes throughout the story but now that I’ve read so many more books I see where there are some real pacing problems and the actual story is a bit lackluster overall, but the jokes are great.

Even though this isn’t as great as I once remembered it being I still so love to dive into this type of humor from time to time and just give into the improbability and impossibility of it all.

I didn’t enjoy this nearly as much as Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency. It started off interesting, but for some reason I became progressively less interested as the story continued and I put the book down more and more frequently. I also didn’t find it as funny. It had humor, but it didn’t make me laugh as much. I think it intentionally took a more serious tone, which I might have appreciated better if I’d been more interested in the story.

The first book had a mixture of elements from both science fiction and fantasy, but I thought it leaned more toward science fiction. This book, on the other hand, was purely in the fantasy category with Norse gods playing a large role in the story. In many ways this reminded me of American Gods, at least in terms of the basic premise, except without the “American” part. This book was published first, so maybe I would feel differently if I had read it first, but I preferred American Gods.

I’m not really sure why this one didn’t work as well for me as Dirk Gently did but, by the end, I was happy to be done with it.

Şahane bir kitap okudum, ŞA-HA-NE!
...
Milenyum Üçlemesinde Stieg Larsson Lisbeth Salander'ın Cebelitarık'ı sevdiğini söyler ve bir kayadan bahseder. Üçlemenin getirdiği her şey için belki sırtını dayayıp dinleyebileceği bir yerdir bu kaya... Adams ile çay saatim bitince istedim ki göklerin tanrısı Thor tıpkı Kate'e yaptığının aynısını yani "bir çiçek demetini kaldırır gibi" beni de kaldırsın ve taaa buralardan tam da bu kayanın dibine bıraksın. Tanrı değil mi yanıma hiç bitmeyen soğuk siyah bira ve belki biraz tuzlu fıstık ile birlikte kitaplarımı da versin. Olsun bu böyle olsun!

The more expansive world and cast of characters in this follow up to the first Dirk Gently novel does wonders to show how many seemingly random events can inevitably come together; thanks to the interconnectedness of all things!

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.

Funny book. Much like all his others.

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...

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.”

[Short review from memory until I re-read at a later date]

(Memories of this is that it was extremely funny and very enjoyable. I can't imagine why I only gave it three stars, but there must have been a reason. In my head Dirk will always look like Stephen Mangan now.)

A crazy adventure...but a bit crude at times.