Peculiar and amusing (Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams)

Member Name: Bryn Pearson

Product:	Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - Douglas Adams
Date:	27/05/02 (107 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: very funny

Disadvantages: relies on knowledge of another text, bitty to start with

Imagine that you've gone to visit an old tutor at University. There's a horse in his bathroom. Then on the way home, you think you drive through your employer's ghost. On returning, you break into your girlfriend's flat to steal the messages from her answering machine, are phoned by a bloke you knew at Uni, and go home to a technically impossible sofa jammed on your staircase. Its one of those days....

Richard is not having an easy life. He's a computer programmer with a deadline, a dead boss, police on his tail, and Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency pressing its case.

To complicate matters, there's an electric monk riding round on a horse randomly believing in things (for a while he believes everything is the same shade of pink, which makes moving about rather tricky.) There are strange Cambridge dons with weird secrets, and a threat to the wellbeing of the plant, oh, and some ghosts, a spaceship, a time machine, and a dead computer tycoon.

Lost yet?

"Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency" starts out as a very bitty piece of writing, and proceeds to make only limited sense for a long time, before eventually all the threads pull together. It is however very witty (more so since the rise of microsoft) and very easy to read. Well, it is easy to read if you have any idea what Mr Adams is talking about.

Douglas Adams likes to borrow ideas from elsewhere, which only works for the reader if you know what he's talking about. If you haven't read The rhyme of the ancient mariner, and know nothing of Schrondinger's cat, then this is going to be somewhat harder work.

I really enjoyed the book, but can see how it might not work for a fair few people. You do have to fill in a fair few gaps, and keep up with the way Adams randomly leaps from one bit of plot to another. The funny bits are very funny though, and the plot is satisfying in the end.

It isn'
t the Hitchiker's guide to the Galaxy, which some people will hold against the text. This strikes me as being a touch unfair, as it is a good peice in its own right.

Read it if you like comic sci-fi, if you don't mind having to do a bit of thinking, and you want entertaining for a few hours. If you can't handle the idea that a sofa might be jammed into a staircase in a way that makes it impossible to remove without sawing up, and that this might be an important sign that something is afoot, stay well away.

Summary: