Its not Cricket (Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams)

Member Name: brownp1

Product:	Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams
Date:	02/10/01 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: funny

Disadvantages: none

Slartibartfast. Wowbagger the Infinitely prolonged. Hactar the computer.

Hoopy froods who along with the regular cast of Ford, Arthur, Zaphod, Trillian and Marvin the paranoid android; and the inventiveness of the word processor of Douglas Adams Life, make reading Life, the Universe and Everything a very pleasurable experience

This is the 3rd (but not final) book in the Hitchhiker’s guide to the Galaxy Trilogy, but don’t worry you don’t have to have read the preceding books to make sense of this one, just remember it’s not meant to make sense.

The story starts with Ford and Arthur stranded in Earth’s pre-history, however they jump on a passing time travelling Chesterton Sofa and reappear at Lords cricket ground just as England retain the Ashes (Cricket lovers will obviously notice at this point that this is a work of fiction). After the excitement of time travel, and an English win at cricket the crowd at MCC are further treated by the appearance of a spaceship from which deadly robots appear, killing and maiming all and sundry with cricket bats, before stealing the ashes and disappearing as suddenly as they appeared.

But what’s really odd is that Ford and Arthur spot Slartibartfast (who designed the fiddly bits around Norway), jump into to his space travelling Italian bistro and give chase. Slartibartfast explains that the Robots are from the lost planet of Krikkit, whose peace loving inhabitants thought they were alone in the universe until a spaceship crashed on their planet. Suddenly roused they decided they had to wipe out all other forms of life and swiftly invented space travel, built a star fleet and proceeded to fulfil their aims. However the rest of the galaxy eventually won the war and locked them on their own planet with a wicket as a key.

The wicket consisted of the steel pillar of strength, the Perspex pillar of science, the wooden pillar of spirituality, the golden bail
of prosperity and the silver bail of peace, with the ashes actually being the wooden stump. After the robots steal the silver bail from a party, which our friends are at, they release the planet Krikkit and ……… well you’ll have to read the book.

What I like about this book, and Adam’s writing in general, is the ability to blend the mundane with the ludicrous to produce something new and funny such as the problems of splitting the restaurant bill which generates a whole new branch of physics in the future enabling. Or alternatively he just jumps off the deep end with a ludicrous idea that somehow seems just right, such as the Someone Else’s Problem field which translates as if you paint a mountain pink and erect the field no-one will want to see the mountain so they won’t be able to.

Sometimes it feels as if the plot is only secondary to the various set piece scenes from which Adams can spin of at a complete tangent bringing in ideas of inspired lunacy which can not fail to make the reader chuckle, but overall both this book and the rest of the series stand up to repeated reading letting you spot something new and hilarious every time.

Summary: