Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) Mass Market Paperback – February 1, 2000

It is impossible not to have some mixed feelings about this novel. It does stand as a return to the wild frivolity and cuttingly biting humor of the first three books, yet it is certainly less than upbeat, all things considered. Despite all kinds of evidence to the contrary, I always had the feeling that things would work out, even for poor Arthur Dent-the universe might not make a bit of sense, of course, but these characters I love so much would ultimately at least find a sense of peace if not happiness in some forgotten corner of the cosmos. It's something of a downer to find out this is not really the case. Two characters who very much made up the heart of the series for me, Marvin and Zaphod, are not even present in these pages. Then you have Fenchurch from the fourth book, a character I really came to love, thrown out of the saga like so much spoiled Perfectly Normal Beast meat. It's nice to have Trillian back, albeit in a couple of transdimensional forms, as well as Ford and Arthur, but it's hard to say who the story is really about. Arthur's new life as a Sandwich Maker on a remote planet his ship crashed on is rather pitiful but totally Dent-like. Ford's attempts to undo the tragic consequences of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy company having been taken over by unscrupulous business men is interesting. The introduction of a Tricia McMillan who did not leave the party with Zaphod because she decided to go back for her handbag ends up just muddying the waters of the fictional time stream. Then there is Random, the biological daughter of Arthur Dent by Trillian; she is even more mixed up and generally confused about life than the father she only meets as a teenager dumped by her too-busy mother. It might be said that this is Random's story, but all she really does is provide the means by which the principal actors Ford, Arthur, and Trillian are eventually brought together for the final conclusion.
Adams did do an impressive job of bringing things together in the end-characters and situations not only from this novel itself but from the start of the whole Hitchhiker's saga (think Vogons). Why a pesky number of loose threads were allowed to hang out, though, while so much work went into resolving other looming storylines, is beyond me and did much to mar the satisfaction I got from the rather abrupt, unfortunate conclusion. I am particularly bothered by the fact that Fenchurch, a character important enough for Adams to have written the entire fourth novel about, is summarily dismissed with little thought and even little grief from Arthur Dent himself. I should not complain about the way Adams chose to end this delightful series of novels of his own imaginative creation, yet I cannot help feeling disappointed if not a little cheated by the way in which everything ended. All in all, while I did enjoy parts of this book immensely, I would rather have ended things with the happy note of So Long, and Thanks For all the Fish, and be left free to imagine what kinds of messes Ford and Arthur might be getting themselves into somewhere in the universe and wondering what really ever happened to Trillian and Zaphod.

Always a lovely read - Adams is very user friendly. He seems to almost have his own genre of which he and Pratchett are the leading exponents. I can't say I laughed out loud too often (although the picture of a drunken Zaphod sticking a birdcage over his second head and badly pretending to be a pirate is hilarious), but it was a very pleasant ride - even if the conclusion is surprisingly bleak for what feels like a light comedy. Like Pratchett (and there are so many `like Pratchett's, although that's probably in the wrong comparative order) Adams throws in some agnostic themes with his humour, although here the ultimate meaninglessness of life is treated a little less whimsically.

It's an interesting hotchpotch of action (and cutting between various cliff-hanger scenes), philosophy, stand-up comic perspectives of the everyday, domestic sit-com, satirical SF, and Douglas' own pleasure in blithely hurling his characters through six impossible things before breakfast. The plot is surprisingly coherent although occasionally incidental.

I still would almost be surprised if Adams didn't cite Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 as a thematic and stylistic influence. Here he lets his sensible and considerate astrologer state the theme that it doesn't matter so much what you believe in (`truth' is irrelevant), but you need something as a structure, a lens, to enable you to live satisfactorily. Adams unsurprisingly explains this much better:
"I know that astrology isn't a science ... of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis ... The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people."

`Discuss', huh.

Yet another author struggles to reconcile loss of faith in major, particularly religious, concepts of truth with the inner conviction that there are important, good and beautiful things all around - that it's not all just meaningless.

And it is a struggle, as in the climax (spoiler warning) Trillian explains to her traumatised daughter who desperately wants to know who she is, where her home is, where she `fits':
This is not your home ... You don't have one. We none of us have one. Hardly anyone has one anymore. The missing ship I was just talking about. The people of that ship don't have a home. They don't know where they are from. The don't even have any memory of who they are or what they are for. The are very lost and very confused and very frightened.

Yeah, ha ha, good one Douglas - hardly Wodehouse light humour. Human condition anyone? I wonder if Adams and Pratchett self-consciously have wanted to be taken `seriously'? I could see that it could be frustrating for them to be dismissed as merely lightweight because they're so popular. They often contain more articulate thought than works by more academic writers, and shouldn't be seen as lesser merely because they happen to also be very good at amusing and entertaining (quite the opposite). That being said, their books should also come with a flyleaf caveat: "Warning - strong post-modern agenda permeates the following jokes".

If there were some laser device I could use to eradicate the memory of this entire novel from my brain, I would use it. I, too, love all of the previous books in the series. When the fact that I loved _So Long and Thanks For All the Fish_ the most is taken into consideration, anyone who's read this will understand why I HATED this one! I have no problem with miserable, defeatist endings (and that's a bit of an exaggeration when applied to this book) but when compared to the whimsical, light-hearted, good-humored satirical tone of the first four this just doesn't fit. It seemed uneccesary to me. I think there should be a warning on the cover...a sort of anti-DON'T PANIC label that lets people who are expecting what the series seemed to be leading to that this is not at all what they were expecting! My advice is, if you loved _So Long...._ for the same reasons I mentioned above, don't bother with this one. Pretend the series ended with number four. And anyone who has read it and feels as bereft as I do, any leads on that memory eradification device?