What did I think? Hmm... I thought that this book was amazing. Mainly because I totally sync with the author's writing style, but also due to the plot, the characters and the subject matters he deals with in this book!

I saved so many quotes to my iPhone while reading this... my poor Notes app is overfilling! But let's not get ahead of ourselves. First off, Adams is just a genius writer. I do believe that everyone can agree with that sentiment. His Hitch Hicker's Guide to the Galaxy series is one of the most popular out there, after all! (And one that I've read through a couple of times as well!)

I actually wanted to read the second book in this series, The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul, for some reason which I can't remember now, but it included GoodReads, something someone said about it, and the crazy title. But before I can read any book in the middle of a series, I really need to read the first books in that series! Thus commenced the lovely road that was Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency.

And it really was a lovely book to read. Amusing, quirky, filled with paradoxes and conundrums and so forth (say, have you ever gotten a sofa stuck in the staircase that leads to your flat in such a way that it is technically impossible to even have found its way there? If so, you might want to consider the possibility of the involuntary of a time machine!).

What I loved most about this book was the way that Adams always includes real scientific newsworthy discoveries into his plots. Who else would base a detective agency based on quantum theory? Who else would set a whole book around such crazy things as ghosts and time travel and saving the universe and still have it coming out slightly believable? Why, Douglass Adams of course!

Anyway, I've been having trouble gathering my thoughts for decent reviews lately, so I think I should leave this one where it is without spoiling any more of the story. I hope to be enjoying the second book in the series just as much as this one!

I discovered Douglas Adams by coincidence. I found his book Last Chance to See, co-written by Mark Cawardine, about animals near extinction and Douglas' and Mark's trip around the world to see some of them, in a box with "Mängelexemplare" (old books, sometimes not in top condition that are therefore sold at a reduced price). His humour stood out even in the German translation and when I told a friend about it, she told me all about an odd-sounding story about a guy hitchhiking across the galaxy and something about the number 42. ;)
Since I've always been an odd duck, I went and bought that book too (in the English original this time) - and have read The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy once every year (May 25th to be exact) ever since.

However, despite having heard of Dirk Gently too, I have never picked up these books, for some weird reason. I'm glad I rectified this now because although I LOVE Hitchhiker, this is actually better!

Douglas Adams has not just been a British author with the usually expected British humour. Sure, he had a dry wit, but also a mind as sharp as a katana and the observations about humanity that he put into his books, while being disguised as silly dialogue or even sillier happenings, are always very deep, reflective and spot-on.

So this story is about the titular Dirk Gently, although that is only the most recent in a long list of names he's used. He doesn't even make an appearance for the first quarter of the book, actually. Mr. Gently believes in the interconnectedness of all things, therefore he named his detective agency "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency".
It's this interconnectedness that has to be proven when a former friend of his with a sofa being stuck halfway up the way to his apartment gets bored half to death at the annual reading of a Coleridge poem (THE Coleridge poem, I should say) at Cambridge university, then witnesses a conjuring trick by one of his old professors, finds a horse in the bathroom of that same professor (after it finally got rid of its rider, an Electric Monk), and finally gets caught up in a very weird murder involving his boss, followed by people acting strangely indeed.
You're confused? Good!
It's a bit like watching Doctor Who and getting all of your brain in a tight knot, but you know exactly that it will all make perfect sense in the end.

As I said, silliness abound in DA's book, but all the silliness serves a purpose and that is what makes this book not only entertaining, but actually intellectually challenging and bloody perfect! Especially eccentric Dirk Gently himself with his weirdness actually makes perfect sense - it's the world that is bonkers.

Thus we end up with gems like the following (some of my favourite bits that I marked in the book):

Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.

So two legs were held to be both more suitable and cheaper than the more normal primes of seventeen, nineteen or twenty-three; the skin the Monks were given was pinkish-looking instead of purple, soft and smooth instead of crenellated. They were also restricted to just one mouth and nose, but were given instead an additional eye, making for a grand total of two. A strange-looking creature indeed. But truly excellent at believing the most preposterous things.

She tried to worry that something had happened to him, but didn't believe it for a moment. Nothing terrible ever happened to him, though she was beginning to think that it was time it damn well did. If nothing terrible happened to him soon maybe she'd do it herself.

... coincidences are strange and dangerous things.

... there is a huge difference between disliking somebody - maybe even disliking them a lot - and actually shooting them, strangling them, dragging them through the fields and setting their house on fire. It was a difference which kept the vast majority of the population alive from day to day.

This was a public telephone so it was clearly an oversight that it was working at all.

Only a child sees things with perfect clarity, because it hasn't developed all those filters which prevent us from seeing things that we don't expect to see?

... normal English condition, that of a damp and rancid dish cloth ...

... he believed with an instant effortlessness which would have impressed even a Scientologist.

"It disturbs me very greatly when I find that I know things and do not know why I know them. Maybe it is the same instinctive processing of data that allows you to catch a ball almost before you've seen it. Maybe it is the deeer and less explicable instinct that tells you when someone is watching you."

"And Mrs. Roberts? How is she? Foot still troubling her?"
"Not since she had it off, thanks for asking, sir. Between you and me, sir, I would've been just as happy to have had her amputated and kept the foot. I had a little spot reserved on the mantlepiece, but there we are, we have to take things as we find them."

The cry "I could have thought of that" is a very popular and misleading one, for the fact is that they didn't, and a very significant and revealing fact it is too.

"Charitable, ha!" said Dirk. "I pay my taxes, what more do you want?"

One thing I could also identify with immensely was this description of Susan:
She had an amazing emotional self-sufficiancy and control provided she could play her cello. He had noticed an odd and extraordinary thing about her relationship with the music she played. If ever she was feeling emotional or upset she could sit and play some music with utter concentration and emerge seeming fresh and calm.
Only in my case the cello has to be replaced by books and playing music by reading. But yes, a very precise description of me.

Oh, and despite me being too young to know too much about what it was like with the very first computers being sold, it was so cool to read about all the technical stuff because I know from interviews and Neil Gaiman's biography of Douglas Adams what a techie / computer enthusiast he was (plus, from a historical point of view alone it must have been pretty exciting).

So you see, not just a thrilling writing style with engaging and quirky characters, but also wit dry enough to start a wildfire that illuminates a wide range of important topics, making the reader not only laugh but also reflect, all while you're having the time of your life.
Honestly, no idea why this is rated lower than Hitchhiker, because despite me being a huge fan (I even bought a towel and stitched "42" and "Don't Panic!" onto it and carry it with me every Towel Day), I am firmly sold on Dirk Gently and think this first volume beats the first of the 5 volumes in the Hitchhiker trilogy.

Unfortunately, I think this book confirms a great suspicion of mine; that the work of Douglas Adams is just not for me. I was never a fan of Hitchiker's, unfortunately, but as a huge fan of the Netflix series (don't hate me, folks) I really wanted to give the book a shot.

The plot is hugely different, so the show seems to have only been influenced by the eccentric titular character, but honestly...and I very rarely say this... the show's plot and character was better. Eeek! I'm sorry, but yes I've said it!

For me, Dirk seemed to really fall flat in this. He never even appeared until over halfway through, prior to which we had just heard a bit of backstory regarding his different name, which I felt served little purpose in the plot, and thus don't really get why it was necessary. When he did appear, he was a relatively 2D, mediocre character; nothing unlikable about him, but also nothing extraordinary about him. The only characters I truly cared for was the Electronic Monk and his horse, however once they serve their purpose to the plot, they kind of disappear, which was a shame.

Speaking of the plot...umm, what? I understand that the weird, eccentric wackiness is Adams' trademark, and I did appreciate the oddness of the atmosphere the book creates (it was one of the few things I did enjoy). However, no matter how trademark this may be, for any author, for me as a reader, it still needs to tie up in a logical matter. For a book based on a character whose life career is to investigate the "interconnectedness" of everything, nothing in this book seemed to connect. I have no clue how the end came to be, and I'm not convinced that everything tied up in a logical way, thus leaving the ending really unsatisfying for me.

The humour is also, personally not for me, however this hasn't affected my grading of the book, as this is personal preference, but I just thought it worth noting.

I think I'm going to call it a day in trying to get on board with Adams' work, I'm afraid. Credit to him as a writer, but he really isn't for me, and I think his literature lacks occasionally in fleshing out characters, and really nailing the balance between wacky plots and a satisfying conclusion.

Too many not fully expanded ideas

The concept of putting as many ideas as possible in as less book space as imaginable worked well for the hitchhiker, but in this case, it was too much, no I mean, less.

It could have been an epic milestone like the ingenious hitchhiker series, but it is simply too short and too densely packed at the same time, it´s a miracle that this is even possible.

Infodump makes one nervous toward the end
The characters and main plots could have been used for one much longer or two short books and it would have been a masterpiece again. More details in the descriptions, probably some more explanations to the reader or another side plot, infodumps, longer dialogues, it would all have been possible if Adams hadn´t tried to distill it to the absolute minimum. I got nervous the closer I got to the end because I couldn´t imagine how all those should culminate in a credible, understandable, and satisfying ending.

Deus ex machinas instead of explanations
Especially the end was really unsatisfying, so much came out of nothing, interesting ideas weren´t described in detail and everything felt quite half-baked with too many questions left unanswered and too much confusion for the reader. And I am someone who reads multi k page series with loads of settings, characters, and connections that can be understandably described by the author without a permanent "what, where, when, why, how?" like in this case.

And it goes puff
Adams' intention has been to make as many and as complex subplots, connections, and associations as possible to let them explode in an epic culmination point, but it didn´t get speed and just hit the fourth wall a tiny little bit without producing more noise than contrived harrumph to let the embarrassing moment pass by. It feels as if there should have been a second half before the sudden ending.

Amazingly still good
Don´t get me wrong, it´s still a good, philosophical book full of innuendos, connotations, and some good laughs, but don´t expect the same quality or the same entertainment as the more famous galactic fun (just the trilogy, not what follows) brought to your mind.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.ph...

Luego de leer Guía del autoestopista galáctico y El restaurante del fin del mundo, del mismo autor, y de ver la adaptación televisiva reciente de esta saga, esperaba algo más surrealista, delirante y con más humor. No puedo decir que me desagradó, pero tampoco que me encantó este libro.

The classic, beloved, brilliant, wacky Douglas Adams, with his penchant for paradoxes and meaningful nonsense and his totally absurd humor. It would be hard for me to chose what I loved most from this book, but I think it was the decision-making program that allows you to justify practically any outcome by back-tracing from the desired result - that could come quite handy, no?
But apart from all this, the book is quite well thought out, with a self-consistent detective story and an imaginitive and complex plot.

Douglas Adams never disappoints.

2.5

So, I picked this up because it was a BotM in one of my groups and I was in the mood for something light and funny. I wanted real laugh-out-loud kind of humor, but, unfortunately, I thought there were only a few chuckles or wry grins, but I don't think one single vocal laugh in the whole book. Well, not for me, anyway. And most of the humor was towards the beginning and started petering out as it progressed, so... yeah...

As for the story itself - it's an odd little thing in which we don't actually meet the title character until a bit more than halfway through (or at least that's what it seemed), and while he was kind of interesting I just didn't care all that much about the overall story.

The one character that I wanted to see more of was the Electric Monk and his horse (ok, I guess that's two characters), but after they served their purpose, so to speak, we don't see all that much of them, and that was disappointing.

Overall not a terrible story, but I'd hoped for so much more than random zaniness which felt forced in places and often disconnected.

Meh.

When I tried to get my fix of Douglas Adams last year, I reached for Mostly Harmless -- and was a little underwhelmed. This should have been my first pick; I have my fix now.

Not as light as the early Hitchhiker books this book is a lot heavier and grimmer though the humour of Douglas Adams shines through from time to time. Written with all the confusion I expect from his work this an interesting, twisted story. I can't say I enjoyed it as much as the Hitchhiker books but it wasn't too bad.

‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ is completely absurd. If you have read other books by Douglas Adams, like The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, gentle reader, it is helpful to know that all of Adams' books, including this one, are hilariously ridiculous and impossible. The characters and the plots are played entirely for laughs, puns, jokes and satire. Oh, and usually some of the known aspects of quantum physics and Einstein's relativity theories drive the action endured by Adams’ mostly hapless and confused main characters, who often are deers in headlights as quantum weirdness takes over their realities. Also, expect ghosts. And electronics which can bridge universes (remember our real history of linking electricity with spiritualism in the late 19th century?) And animals with some very human-like or weirdly species-appropriate thinking.

It takes a few chapters and many seemingly disconnected introductory scenes of many other characters, but eventually Dirk Gently is introduced. Dirk Gently is a very peculiar detective. He has been forced into the profession after being sent down from St. Cedd's college for cheating. He didn't cheat - it was a coincidence when he guessed all of the answers to an upcoming test correctly. He DID coach many students in the answers to the test to make money, supposedly through mystic means which he believed he was faking, but he truly had no idea his con would end up being so correct. The unspoken assumption behind Gently's becoming a detective is the mystery of having all of the right answers when he never knew he had all of the right answers has led him to being a detective. He is not a mystic, but he believes in particle physics and Einstein's relativity, apparently, and all of the spooky science which comes out of that, and especially, maybe, in the Grand Unification Theory of Everything. A Holistic universe, so to speak. Hehe.

Of course, as the author explains Gently's accidentally appearing to be seemingly clairvoyant, or in the University's thinking, a cheater, Gently was actually a simple student who simply knew the patterns of the usual questions asked on the usual exams given usually in any given subject. He made assumptions that some form of the usual questions with the usual answers would be asked. He hinted it was a mystical process when he was only being logical, based on past patterns of human behavior - which if you analyze, gentle reader, is a holistic exercise we all do, and get better at, as we age and collect patterns of past behaviors of actual people around us...and coincidences of perfect guesses occur, an actual scientific possibility of statistics. Or like a guess of what Time it is being correct twice a day.

: D


Adams appears to me to design scenes in the manner of someone using free-association word games where someone who is trying to think of creative ideas writes down a word on a paper, and then follows that up with whatever words are triggered by that word, letting the mind go where it will without restraint - and then putting some humorous order to the ideas, like the physics theories which most decidedly are putting a humorous and impossible order on the actual universe. In Adams case, these wild and insane ideas appear to always involve quantum/relativity physics craziness, along with space aliens, which he spins down into a kind of daft coherency - barely.

This is the usual premise of a Douglas Adams' novel: Barely competent space aliens land on Earth and cause mysterious events to occur to barely competent earthlings. The space aliens have the advantage of superior technology, which, combined with the aliens' ignorance or incompetence, frequently bring horrendous side effects to the unfortunate earthlings who unsuspectingly become part of whoever and whatever space aliens' lives they have the bad luck with whom to be swept up. Three hundred pages later, luck and fate and accidents have led the main characters, and us readers, down a rabbit hole to an Alice-in-Wonderland adventure which we all have miraculously survived!

Even though describing an Adams' book can make them seem alike, this is not true. Well, not entirely true. What is important is the novels are extremely funny and entertaining! However, the humor is whacked out and often bizarrely witty. It requires a flexible mindset, and being prepared for all kinds of coloring outside the lines.


We assume space aliens would be smarter than us, or more noble, or are more purposefully vicious, and intent on a plan or have goals in mind - after all, to fly here would require all sorts of brilliant technology which should reflect a greater intelligence. But what if space aliens, even if they have better tech, are no different in their faults or interests or mental lapses than any humans? What if space aliens differ the same way people differ - they can drive a spaceship or time machine like most of us drive a car, but just like most of us, they do not know any more of how their spaceship works than we do, but they do want a vacation or just an outing, or an adventure, just like we do. Plus, they have missed connections, or their vehicle breaks down, or they run out of money, or decide to settle, for the same reasons we do.

The fact is we are all unknowingly silly while we believe we are doing things meaningfully - this fact slowly grows on readers of Adams' novels. People are very very silly. This is why Adams has had plenty of silly material for his books.

That said, I would not read this book first of Adams’ work. I’d start with ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ - in my opinion, his best book.

Here is a link to my review of 'The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul': https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Doğrusu beynim güzel yandı.

“He instituted this Chair of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realised I could then take the rest of my career off.”

Books by  Oscar Wilde,  Terry Pratchett and  Douglas Adams have (at least) one thing in common. I can easily pick funny, witty, interesting quotes from every page. The above quote represents Adams’ surreal sense of humour quite nicely, I think.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is of course, Douglas Adams’ lesser known series, compared to the incomparable (but often compared to) Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Still, there are only five “Hitchhiker's” books, excluding Eoin Colfer's  And Another Thing..., which—in all fairness—I have not read, but I am not that big a fan of Colfer's  Artemis Fowl, so the idea of a sequel by him is a nonstarter for me.

So how does Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency compare to  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy? What kind of question is that? Damn you! (Sorry, I’m feeling a bit schizophrenic). Anyway, the answer to that question would be “favorably”. It does not have the epic space opera setting of Hitchhiker's, but then Adams wanted to write something different rather than retread old ground so the smaller scale of the setting is understandable.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is not really about the eponymous Dirk Gently’s, I would not even call him the protagonist. He is one of the central characters. As the book has to be called something the title Adams went with is a suitably intriguing one. The plot of the novel is a combination of several seemingly unrelated plot strands. It starts with an “Electric Monk” looking for a Door (the capital D distinguishes from any old door), then the scene switches to a dinner at St. Cedd's College in Cambridge where Professor Urban Chronotis performs a seemingly commonplace magic trick is for a child. Soon after that a horse is found in the professor’s bathroom. A wealthy businessman is shot dead for no reason, and his ghost starts to roam. An alien spacecraft accidentally lands and soon blows up.

The disparate plotlines are actually interrelated, and the only man who can find the connection between them is Dirk Gently, the world’s first “Holistic Detective”, which means that he understands “the fundamental interconnectedness of all things”. Sherlock Holmes famously said “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth”, Dirk Gently goes one better by not even eliminating the impossible (see one of the selected quotes below). His ability to make intuitive leaps verges on being a superpower.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency reminds me a little bit of Kurt Vonnegut's  Breakfast of Champions, another novel with different plotlines that seem to bear no relation to each other. I thought that was a bit of a mess, but a funny, admirable and beautiful one by the time I finished it. “Dirk Gently’s” is similarly messy, but the eponymous Dirk untangles all the plot strands by the end of the book. For the most part, it is easy enough to follow, and always funny, but the climax and denouement are a little convoluted. If your attention strayed during some seemingly unimportant scenes some of the expositions at the end may be confusing. For the most part Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a madcap surreal comic novel with a lot of sci-fi elements that you can expect from Douglas Adams. However, a shade of sadness, melancholy and loneliness permeate the last few chapters of the book.

The characters are mostly well developed, with Dirk, being the standout due to his eccentricity and superhuman intuition. Not far behind is the enigmatic Professor Urban Chronotis who is much more than he seems, and he also appears in  Doctor Who: Shada, based on Adams’ Doctor Who TV episode script.

If you are a fan of  The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy but have read all the books already you should not miss this book. On the other hand—or perhaps the same hand but different fingers—if you have not read all the “Hitchhiker's” books, or have not read any, or never heard of Douglas Adams, you should still not miss this book. Who then, should give this book a miss? I don’t know, dead people perhaps?

_________________________
Notes:
• There was a BBC adaptation of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency in 2010, only a few episodes were made. Quite good as I recall.

• A new adaptation is being made by BBC America (announced March 2016)

• I am looking forward to reading the sequel  The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul soon.