From Ultra Violent to Infra Dead (Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams)

Member Name: Frankingsteins

Product:	Life, the Universe and Everything - Douglas Adams
Date:	02/07/04 (109 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Original, hilarious, compelling and enjoyable, Excellent characters, Even more strangely believable notions

Disadvantages: Danger element seems a bit out of place, Not to everyone's taste, The great ending was never meant to be

The first three books in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of five were published in consecutive years from 1980 to 1982 and as such share a common style and similar themes more than the final two books that were written some time later. ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ offers a satisfying conclusion (although one that was not destined to be permanent) to the very funny and ingenious storyline that started with a man lying in his dressing gown in front of a bulldozer.

Some of the late Douglas Adams’ fans do not hold this third instalment in the same regard as the first two books, both of which were based largely on the original BBC radio show written by Adams, but there are a number of reasons why I consider it to be one of the very best, beaten only by the classic first book: the plot is fast-paced and constantly changing, every character receives their due attention, some seemingly trivial points from the first book are expanded upon out of all proportion and it is also the first of the books comprised of completely new material. All that, and it also introduces one of my favourite concepts in the entire Hitchhiker’s series, on the subject of spontaneous non-assisted flight:

“There is an art, or rather, a knack to flying.
The knack lies in learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss.”


STYLE


Anyone who hasn’t read the award-winning first book in this series should not begin here; the plot is largely self-contained and certainly enjoyable on its own, but knowledge of the characters and their situations adds to the enjoyment greatly. Simply looking at the original front cover of the book, depicting a ring-pull floating through space under the grandiose title ‘Life, the universe and everything,’ should give a clear indication that this is a well-crafted exploration of space, time and the meaning of everything, but with jokes.

Unlike some of Adams’ later works, such as ‘So Long and Thanks For All the Fish’ and the Dirk Gently series that deliberately relied on perplexing the reader and constructing a mysterious and intricate plot, ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ follows a linear path that is only broken up by brief extracts from the Hitchhiker’s Guide database itself (resulting in some of the shortest chapters known to man) and the backstory of galactic history, something which follows its own linear path amongst the other chapters. Although some concepts require a bit of re-reading and thought, this isn’t aimed solely at intellectuals and is actually quite straightforward in terms of its plot, and can be read by all ages as there is only one swear word (but it’s a good ‘un).

It’s clear that Adams’ own educated, thirty-something views of life form the basis for these books, however exaggerated and celestial they may be, as many of the jokes give clear insight into his feelings about humanity in general. After briefly exploring how the development and subsequent abuse of time machines led to corporate sponsorship applying itself to classical literature, Adams notes: “the past is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.” And there is no doubt left in the reader’s mind about Adams’ views of restaurants in the lengthy Bistromath explanation based on “non-absolute numbers” involving the relationship between the number of people who say they will turn up and the ones that actually do, the times they say they will arrive and the much later times they actually do arrive and finally the relationship between what a meal should theoretically cost and the extortionate amount that is eventually presented. To say that Douglas Adams was ever frustrated in a restaurant would be a clear understatement.


CHARACTERS


The hero of the series (if such a contradiction could be applied) is the very ordinary Arthur Philip Dent, a man initially described in the first book as “about thirty… dark haired and never quite at ease with himself,” whose borderline middle-class attitude and inability to really cope with having his perceptions of life, the universe and everything shattered as soon as he was beamed away from the exploding planet Earth and is never really given time to recover. In this book, Arthur again spends a lot of time with his old friend Ford Prefect and again has quite a miserable time of it, especially when confronted with his arch nemesis Agrajag.

Ford Prefect is quite odd, but then again he is an alien from Betelgeuse. The first book describes Ford brilliantly in terms of everything about his appearance and mannerisms being not quite right, and although he could be potentially annoying (especially in the TV series when played by a quite annoying actor), his mixture of enthusiasm, confidence and questionable reliability makes him another of my favourites. It’s good to see him finally out of his depth a little when confronted with the dire situations of this book.

Zaphod Beeblebrox is the smooth-talking, dual-headed, three-armed ex-President of the Galaxy, and as such he is fairly self-obsessed. Zaphod has less of a role to play here than in the last book but he still manages to be very funny, especially when confronted with danger, and I’ve never understood why Adams omitted him from the later books.

Trillian (Tricia McMillan) is the token lady of the bunch in a novel of men written by a man, but she is again shown to be the only really capable one of the group in her few scenes. There’s sadly not that much to endear the reader to Trillian as her scenes are very brief and there is no ability to get the visual appeal, but she still feels like an important presence. Trillian was also not present in the fourth book, but played a very large role in its successor.

Marvin, the constantly depressed robot, had most of the classic lines in the first book but felt a little underused in the sequel. This book again sees less focus on Marvin than the other characters, which is how I think it should be to avoid this becoming ‘the Paranoid Android series,’ but he inadvertently plays quite a major role when his leg is stolen by evil robots. He also has a great scene early on, discussing life with a mattress in a swamp. You should know by know whether this book is your cup of tea, or something best avoided.

Slartibartfast isn’t strictly speaking a major character but he is still a very important and notable presence, and he’s a funny old man which is always interesting. Having spent decades designing planets for wealthy races of pan-dimensional beings, Slartibartfast has now dedicated his life to the preservation of the universe which is quite nice, but he could have made the physics of his spacecraft a little less confusing.


PLOT


A lot of stuff happened in the first two books. I think that’s the only brief description I’m able to provide. A lot of stuff happened, resulting in Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect being sent back in time to prehistoric Earth. Not defying convention, the third book opens where the second left off, although many months have passed and Arthur has started to make his cave his home when Ford decides to return from his antics just in time to see a sofa speeding across the land. The men give chase and eventually find themselves sitting in Lord’s cricket ground some time in the very early eighties, witnessing a horde of robots emerging from a space craft and stealing the cricket bails. Arthur and Ford are reunited with their old acquaintance Slartibartfast, and as soon as they learn the bistro-oriented nature of his craft’s Somebody Else’s Problem field, it’s clear that Douglas Adams’ writing has lost none of its charm, wit and incomprehensibility.

Throughout the course of the book, characters are reunited and isolated, jokes are made at the expense of parties and handbags, the Norse god Thor shows up in a minor role and the very existence of the universe is threatened when the expiry date on a time-freezing field surrounding the deadly planet Krikkit essentially expires.

The planet Krikkit is located inside a dark nebula and as such offered a starless night to the enlightened and peaceful inhabitants for millennia before an important event happened: a small spacecraft fell through the sky and landed in a field. Those who discovered it used it to emerge from their planet, only to be confronted with a view of millions of stars forming what appeared to be a vast universe. The somewhat xenophobic race noted, “it has to go.”

Meanwhile there’s plenty of space opera in the struggling relationship between Trillian and Zaphod Beeblebrox (he does have one more head and arm than her after all) and there’s still plenty of time for Marvin the paranoid android to criticise everything and everyone like some Canadian stand-up comedian, except that he’s very funny.


VERDICT


As a long-time fan of television series such as Red Dwarf, and even the Red Dwarf books, I assumed I would enjoy the original Hitchhiker’s Guide book, but I didn’t realise how much I would love reading it. The first book is a brilliant and flawless offering from Douglas Adams that never gets boring or too weird for the sake of it, but I found the sequel ‘The Restaurant at the End of the Universe’ a bit of a disappointment in comparison; it was still funny, but it seemed to drag on far too much and was never hilarious to the point of making me laugh out loud and smack my thigh. Thankfully, ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ was very competent at causing these outbursts and spontaneous reflex actions, although the introduction of genuine danger into a light-hearted series does seem a little unnecessary. I love this book primarily for the characters, especially the hapless Arthur who is essentially showing the untrained human response to bizarre situations, but who is becoming experienced and a little strange himself.

In my opinion this is the final of the ‘classic’ Hitchhiker’s Guide books before they took a different direction in the late eighties to nineties, but there are so many different views on the series that I can’t really criticise them. The fourth and fifth books are still very amusing and enjoyable, but lack a bit of the wacky eighties space sitcom element that crosses into cartoon territory on a number of occasions. This third instalment is a vital middle chapter of the series that was never permitted to be properly concluded due to Douglas Adams’ unexpected death in 2001 at the age of forty-nine. There were two radio series and one very low-budget but much-loved television series in the early eighties that mostly mirror the plots of the first two books, but ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ is an original work that brings everything to an excellent conclusion, while also presenting opportunities for the future of the franchise.

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