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...

My partner insisted that I read this book. It isn't my usual cup of tea and it took a while for me to really get into the story. But in the end the whimsical and comedic writing of the late Douglas Adams won me over. Now I'm sad that Mr. Adams passed before he was able to finish the sequel. I would love to be able to accompany Dirk Gently on another impossible adventure, I might have to check out the first book to feature the holistic detective, although my partner has said it isn't as whimsical as this one. I like whimsy. Overall I enjoyed this book.

I recently re-read Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency and realized it was not as good as I remembered so I approached my re-read of Tea Time with some trepidation. I remember loving this book, really loving it. Perhaps it might be better not to read it again.

I'm happy to report that for me, the book holds up. It's funny, it's weird, it has Norse gods. I love it and it remains one of my favorite books of all time.

I was also reacquainted with a paragraph that I remember fondly from reading this book long ago:

"Yes, it is true," he was saying, "that sometimes unusually intelligent and sensitive children can appear to be stupid. But, Mrs. Benson, stupid children can sometimes appear to be stupid as well. I think that's something you might have to consider. I know it's very painful, yes. Good day Mrs. Benson."

Douglas Adams brings his trademark wit to The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul (I say that like I've read more than two books from him), and when it works, it works.

The book starts pretty good, mixing detective fiction with Adams' sense of humor. He showcases his talent for mixing the weird and sort of creepy into a humorous twist, especially in the early chapters where the strange events really take off.

But then things get messy. The story loses its way about a quarter through, becoming a tangled and confusing slop of nothingness. Like I can get a few themes from this book but it really feels like a pointless tale. And I understand that not all books need to mean something or have some themes to them, but they have to be enjoyable.

While everything does come together in the end, getting there feels like more work than fun. The jokes are there, but they can't quite save the mediocre story. It's not a horrible book. Adams still makes you laugh. Best to think of it as a good joke that goes on a bit too long. Sorry Max.

2.4/5

Pas une suite à proprement parlé , mais plutôt une deuxième enquête où on retrouve le personnage principal de cette série : Dirk Gently. Très drôle même si j'ai moins rigolé qu'en lisant un Cheval dans la salle de bain. J'ai trouvé le livre mieux construit que le premier, la conclusion est intéressante. Le personnage de Dirk est plus mis en avant. Toujours aussi absurde, c'est une très bonne lecture que je recommande.

7/13/21 ETA: This was even more funny than I remembered, and I think I understood the end better this time, though it still gets a bit frantic. Revisiting Adams made me happy.

"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...

Once again, rather than attempt to describe the latest of holistic detective Dirk Gently's adventures, I will instead present a selection of completely random quotes from the book. They really have nothing to do with each other, but I like them.

"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."

"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."

"Confuse your enemy, he thought. It was a little like phoning somebody up, and saying 'Yes? Hello?' in a testy voice when they answered, which was one of Dirk's favorite methods of whiling away long, hot summer afternoons."

Oh, Douglas Adams. Shine on, you crazy diamond.

Douglas Adams never fails to cheer me up. Best listened to on audio.

This is very hard for me, you know? I love Douglas Adams; I adore his phrasing, his word structure, and how he manages to make things seem funny,ridiculous, menacing or heartbreaking. I've loved the Hitchhiker books, and he continues to be one of the writers I care for quite immensely.

This is why rating this book as 3/5 is so sad for me, this book started off great, with plenty of intrigue and mystery, and a bunch of characters that seemed interesting and off their rockers (in other words, regular Adams fare). So, I thought I was going to love it, and I did!

But then I came to the last few chapters, and it seems like someone was on Adams's case, asking him to finish the damn book. The whole thing seems hurried, with characters jumping around and events taking place so fast that you couldn't even tell what had happened until you've read it again. His randomness, which is endearing when used carefully, is tossed about everywhere, as he ties up every single loose end in a matter of a few paragraphs.

I won't lie; I felt cheated by the end of this book, and I don't like to be cheated.

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).

Sai quanti sassi ci sono nel Galles?

Leggere Douglas Adams per me è un po' come tornare a casa: è caotico e confortante, come una stanza disordinata ma familiare.
I personaggi sono assurdi e caricaturali, impossibile immedesimarsi davvero. Gli avvenimenti surreali e paradossali: aquile che svolazzano nel cielo di Londra, Dei nordici fissati con le lenzuola di lino, pizze che proprio non ne vogliono sapere di farsi consegnare a domicilio.
Proprio quello che mi serviva, questa rilettura, per ritrovare il giusto ritmo del respiro e un po' di leggerezza.