The Restaurant at the End of the Universe by Douglas Adams

Source of book: I own this.

We listened to the audiobook read by Martin Freeman - which was really good. 

I first read the first Hitchhikers book when I was pretty young. Young enough to be mildly scandalized by the references to sex. But I thought it was hilarious even then, and proceeded to read all of them for the first time during my teens. I re-read them at least once thereafter, but it has been a while.

As a general rule, books change as you grow and age. A book has one vibe during one’s childhood, another as a teen, another as a young adult, and another as a middle aged sort. And I am speaking purely of how the reader changes. Other times, the historical moment itself is radically different, giving an entirely different meaning to the text.

This latter phenomenon is what I experienced this time through The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The first book is pretty good, admittedly, and has so many good quotable lines that it sticks with one. I also remember that the third book (Life, the Universe, and Everything) was my favorite - probably because of the concept of the Somebody Else’s Problem Field - which I actually used in a case once. (The judge laughed…) But I didn’t really remember that much about the second book.

Reading/listening to it now, however, I realize that it expanded on the political satire of the first book - and both together sound like prophecy of the Trump Era. (Zaphod may be a lot more fun and harmless than Trump, but he has all the narcissism and inexplicable popularity.) The jokes at the expense of religion are also a lot more funny now that I am older and a bit more jaded.

To try to summarize the plot seems pointless. The plot mostly exists to carry forward the bizarre imagination of the author. Suffice it to say that the Vogons still want to kill Arthur Dent, Zaphod is still on the run for stealing the Heart of Gold, and bad things happen.

The details are fun, though. I vaguely remembered the scene where Arthur crashes the ship’s systems trying to get the replicator to make a decent cup of tea. I didn’t remember the hilarious repartee between Zaphod and his great-grandfather (Zaphod Beeblebrox IV - the numbers are backwards because of an accident involving a time machine and a contraceptive…)

I also remembered a good bit of the restaurant scene - which still rates as one of the best in the series. The uncomfortable exchange between the diners and the beast which has been bred to desire being eaten made me wince as much as I did when I first read it. What is it about us humans who have less difficulty eating something which definitely did not want to be eaten than we would something which did? That’s kind of weird if you think about it. I also didn’t anticipate last time I read it that I would eventually have a daughter (#2 - the morbid one) ask me at age 3 if animals liked being eaten.

So, there were a few lines that stood out enough that I remembered them even though I was driving while we listened.

The first is about the Hitchhiker’s Guide itself.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is an indispensable companion to all those who are keen to make sense of life in an infinitely complex and confusing Universe, for though it cannot hope to be useful or informative on all matters, it does at least make the reassuring claim, that where it is inaccurate it is at least definitively inaccurate. In cases of major discrepancy, it’s always reality that’s got it wrong.

This was the gist of the notice. It said “The Guide is definitive. Reality is frequently inaccurate.”

Hey, that sounds super familiar! And not just because the followers of Galen considered the corpse to be inaccurate when it failed to match Galen’s descriptions.

Rather, this is how the Fundamentalist tradition I grew up in approached the Bible - it was always the infallible guide to Life, the Universe, and Everything. It was to be taken literally as an instruction book and inerrant guide to everything from science to ethics.

And when reality contradicted it - or really, when reality contradicted the theological superstructure - the layers of interpretation and doctrinal dogma which told us what the ancient book meant, well, it was always reality which was wrong, not the dogma. So if the dogma told us that the book meant that women were to be subservient to men, then, well, the reality of the equal intelligence of women was clearly in error. Reality was “inaccurate.”

Adams is definitely on to something here. His analogy of the Guide is also interesting in a way I didn’t realize when I first read the book. The point of a guide book of this nature is that it should be constantly revised to reflect better knowledge, new information, and ongoing changes. That’s why nobody buys the 1976 AAA guidebooks now. (Actually, the internet has replaced those altogether these days.)

In our modern times, we, for reasons I am having a harder and harder time understanding, seem intent on considering our sacred books “definitive” because we view them - and their interpretation - as unchanging. As in the case of the Guide, this is rather obviously bunk. Not only that, it is exactly opposite from how the ancients viewed them. As Yale professor Christine Hayes points out in her fantastic course on the Old Testament, the ancients considered their sacred writings to be definitive not because they didn’t change, but because they did. They were living, and the stories were retold, rewritten, and reinterpreted to reflect changing needs and changing issues. (It is not an exaggeration to say that this course is the best thing I have ever listened to on the OT - it is such a refreshing look at a difficult collection of writings that have been so abused by my faith tradition.)

Not too long afterward, when Zaphod finds himself about to be put into the Total Perspective Vortex, the author writes a few more zingers.

The Universe, as has been observed before, is an unsettlingly big place, a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore.

Many would happily move to somewhere rather smaller of their own devising, and this is what most beings in fact do.

Adams then cites an imaginary race which lives in a single tree - and the only way people leave is when they are kicked out for asking uncomfortable questions which presuppose a larger world out there.

Exotic though this behavior may seem, there is no life form in the galaxy which is not in some way guilty of the same thing, which is why the Total Perspective Vortex is as horrific as it is.

For when you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little marker, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, “You are here.”

…[I]f life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion.

I will mention the captain in the bathtub, the band Disaster Area and the whole mythology surrounding it, Max Quordlepleen - the quintessential Las Vegas MC and comedian, then endlessly delayed flight. And, of course, the real ruler of the galaxy, with is endless ontological uncertainty. I found that I enjoyed this installment more than I recalled enjoying it previously, presumably because I get more of the jokes this time around.

I mentioned above that Martin Freeman was excellent. I was a bit worried, because the audiobook of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy was narrated by Stephen Fry, who is so delightful that I expected disappointment. But actually, Freeman was great. In particular, his imaginative voicing of the various eccentric minor characters was impressive - you could easily believe it was different actors playing the parts. Our library has the third book also narrated by Freeman, which makes me happy. I am looking forward to that one.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Source of book: Audiobook from the library (but I do own all the Hitchhiker’s Guide books)

If I were Supreme Lifetime Dictator of the Earth™ I would enact the following rule:

All audiobooks henceforth shall be read by Stephen Fry.

Okay, there can be a few exceptions. Neil Gaiman should read his own books.  And Mary Roach too. I’m on the fence about P. G. Wodehouse. Jonathan Cecil is so very, very good, but Fry is the ultimate embodiment of Jeeves…

So anyway, a friend who shares my love for Douglas Adams informed me that Stephen Fry had indeed narrated a version of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, I knew we had to listen to it. My wife, however, was the one who actually pulled the trigger and picked it up.

I first discovered this book when I was fairly young. My dad had it, and I borrowed it. No, I didn’t ask permission, and may not have gotten it had I done so. But I fell in love, and never regretted reading it. (It was, if I recall, the first book I ever read that had a few swear words in it. On a related note, I still think swearing sounds best in a British accent…)

It should come as no surprise, therefore, that we listened to it as a family - or that my kids thought it was hilarious. Actually, about the only surprise was just how many of the more sophisticated jokes drew laughs from my boys (ages 10 and 8.) They are growing up to be the right sort of young men, clearly.

This is my fourth or fifth time through this book, so I knew it pretty well already. But I was surprised at how incredibly well this book has aged. In fact, there were several times I realized that it could have been written this year - the issues are that timeless. Police brutality? Yep. Narcissistic celebrity presidential candidates? Oh yes. Artificial Intelligence with personality? Still the best portrayal I have read. Conspiracy theories about the age of the earth? You bet. Bureaucratic boondoggles? Yes, and this version includes bad poetry. Philosophy, hucksterism, probability, modern poetry, sentient mice, tea...it’s all there. And don’t forget the bad puns and deliciously zany lines.

For those not familiar with the plot, Arthur Dent, a not-terribly-bright 30-something Englishman finds his world turned upside down one day. First, it appears that his house will be demolished to make way for a bypass, then his friend Ford Prefect turns out to be an alien from near Betelgeuse, and to cap things off, the Vogons demolish Earth to make way for an interstellar bypass. That’s enough to ruin everyone’s day.

So Arthur and Ford end up hitchhiking across the galaxy. Well, more or less. They get picked up by Zaphod Beeblebrox (who had an extra head and arm added to his already fabulous body), the president of the galaxy, who has just stolen a top-secret spaceship, and Trillian, formerly Trisha McMillan, the only other surviving human in the universe. And then comes Marvin, the depressed android, and a magical spaceship which runs on improbability, and the a mythical planet where custom planets were manufactured for the ultra-rich, and...well just read the book already.

And, believe it or not, you will learn the answer to the ultimate question of Life, the Universe, and Everything.

I simply must quote a few lines, however. The very opening of the book sets the tone - and my kids laughed loudly at it.

Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the Western Spiral Arm of the Galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-eight million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.

This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movements of small green pieces of paper, which is odd because on the whole it wasn’t the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.

And so the problem remained; lots of people were mean, and most of them were miserable, even the ones with digital watches.

The digital watches are a recurring idea, incidentally.

There are of course many problems connected with life, of which some of the most popular are Why are people born? Why do they die? Why do they want to spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?

The next line is better in context, but it would take too long to explain all of it. Nevertheless, it is representative of the unexpected zaniness of the plot twists.

Curiously enough, the only thing that went through the mind of the bowl of petunias as it fell was Oh no, not again. Many people have speculated that if we knew exactly why the bowl of petunias had thought that we would know a lot more about the nature of the Universe than we do now.

Speaking of philosophical questions, Adams skewers modern philosophy in hilarious fashion. As the computer Deep Thought prepares to calculate the answer to the ultimate question, a couple of Philosophers break in, and demand that their union jobs be protected.

“Who are you?” said Lunkwill, rising angrily from his seat. “What do you want?”

“I am Majikthise!” announced the older one.

“And I demand that I am Vroomfondel!” shouted the younger one.

Majikthise turned on Vroomfondel. “It’s all right,” he explained angrily, “you don’t need to demand that.”

“All right!” bawled Vroomfondel, banging on a nearby desk. “I am Vroomfondel, and that is not a demand, that is a solid fact! What we demand is solid facts!”

“No, we don’t!” exclaimed Majikthise in irritation. “That is precisely what we don’t demand.”

Scarcely pausing for breath, Vroomfondel shouted, “We don’t demand solid facts! What we demand is a total absence of solid facts. I demand that I may or may not be Vroomfondel!”

The bit involving the cops is pretty funny too. Particularly since British police officers are, but near-universal agreement, the nicest in the world. (Not that I have much experience, though. My visit to England was notable for the absence of any brushes with the law.)

“Now see here, guy,” said the voice, “you’re not dealing with any dumb two-bit trigger-pumping morons with low hairlines, little piggy eyes and no conversation, we’re a couple of caring guys that you’d quite like if you met us socially! I don’t go around gratuitously shooting people and then bragging about it afterward in seedy space-ranger bars, like some cops I could mention! I go around shooting people gratuitously and then I agonize about it afterward for hours to my girlfriend!”

“And I write novels!” chimed in the other cop. “Though I haven’t had any of them published yet, so I better warn you, I’m in a meeeean mood!”

    …

“Because,” shouted the cop, “it’s going to be very intelligent, and quite interesting and humane! Now - either you all give yourselves up now and let us beat you up a bit, though not very much of course because we are firmly opposed to needless violence, or we blow up this entire planet and possibly one or two others we noticed on our way out of here!”

“But that’s crazy!” cried Trillian. “You wouldn’t do that!”

“Oh yes, we could,” shouted the cop, “wouldn’t we?” he asked the other one.

“Oh yes, we’d have to, no question,” the other one called back.

“But why?” demanded Trillian.

“Because there are some things you have to do even if you are an enlightened liberal cop who knows all about sensitivity and everything!”

And, I just have to quote a bit from the end - a selection from the Guide itself - which transitions into the next book.

“The History of every major Galactic Civilization tends to pass through three distinct and recognizable phases, those of Survival, Inquiry and Sophistication, otherwise known as the How, Why, and Where phases. For instances, the first phase is characterized by the question How can we eat? The second by the question Why do we eat? And the third by the question Where shall we have lunch?”  

Seriously, if you haven’t yet read these books, it’s high time you did. And don’t forget your towel.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul by Douglas Adams

Source of book: I own this.

I first discovered the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy when I was pretty young. I can’t remember exactly how you, but probably late elementary school. I borrowed my dad’s copy, and definitely did not let them know I was reading it. At least after it became clear that it had a few, um, naughty references. But anyway, it was a lot of fun, even at that age, although I suspect some things went over my head. Later, my brother and I acquired all of the series, and proceeded to reference stuff from it as an inside joke of sorts.

Come to think of it, one of the highlights of my legal career was getting to use the “Somebody Else’s Problem Field” in a case. I got a chuckle from the judge.

A few years ago, I read Last Chance to See, a non-fiction work Adams co-wrote with Mark Carwardine about critically endangered species, but this was my first foray into Adams’ non-Hitchhiker fiction. 

Like the Hitchhikers series, I think you have to approach this book with the same mindset, which is that not everything will be explained, and the last few chapters will be too quick and messy to make sense. Apparently, Adams had a huge problem with deadlines, and tended to dash off whatever he could at the end.

This is the second book in the Dirk Gently series, and I have not read the first, so for all I know, I am missing some background information. The title itself is taken from a line in the third Hitchhiker novel, Life, The Universe, and Everything. A character named Wowbagger, who accidentally became immortal as a result of an industrial accident, has succumbed to endless boredom, the “long dark tea time of the soul.” Since the king of the gods, Odin, features in this book, perhaps this is a nod to immortality.

In any case, here is the setup. Dirk Gently is a self-nominated “Holistic” detective, believing in the interconnection of everything. He is also pretty much an incompetent slob, who takes a number of detective cliches to their extreme conclusion. An incident at Heathrow airport results in the disappearance of an airline clerk and the destruction of a terminal. Meanwhile, Dirk’s client, a record executive who had been complaining about a contract and a green man with a scythe winds up dead with his head rotating on a phonograph. As things unfold, it turns out that Odin made the mistake of signing a contract with a lawyer, his son Thor becomes recalcitrant, and chaos ensues. How will Dirk and his accidental accomplice Kate straighten things out?

There are two reasons that I won’t give away any more of the plot. First, because this is the sort of book that shouldn’t be spoiled. Second, I had to do some research to figure out exactly what the ending was supposed to mean. And even then, there appear to be multiple interpretations.

I do want to quote a few things, though. A good bit of the fun of Adams’ writing is his witty and unexpected lines. The opening paragraphs are particularly good.

It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression “As pretty as an airport.”

Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.

They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with the brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colors, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler forever from his or her luggage or loved ones, to confuse the traveler with arrows that appear to point at the windows, distant tie racks, or the current position of Ursa Minor in the night sky, and wherever possible to expose the plumbing on the grounds that it is function, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not.

Another great one occurs when Kate (having survived the airport explosion) insists on checking herself out of the hospital, informing the nurses and doctor that the air in the hospital “smells like a vacuum cleaner’s armpit.”

Kate also delivers a line in frustration at Dirk, who very much deserves it.

“I see,” said Dirk. “You have, if I may say so, the air of one to whom her day has not been a source of joy or spiritual enrichment.”

“Too damn right it hasn’t,” said Kate. “I’ve had the sort of day that would make Saint Francis of Assisi kick babies.”

Later, Dirk contemplates the way things have changed since the good old days.

Things had certainly come down a long way since the great days of Faust and Mephistopheles, when a man could gain all the knowledge of the universe, achieve all the ambitions of his mind and all the pleasures of the flesh for the price of his soul. Now it was a few record royalties, a few pieces of trendy furniture, a trinket to stick on your bathroom wall and whap, your head comes off.

Last, there is one of Adams’ trademark descriptions where everything is delightfully upside-down.

Dennis Hutch had stepped up into the top seat when its [a record company] founder had died of a lethal overdose of brick wall, taken while under the influence of a Ferrari and a bottle of Tequila.

Anyway, a fun book, if not quite the classic that the Hitchhiker series is.

Last Chance to See by Douglas Adams & Mark Carwardine

Source of book: Borrowed from and recommended by my friend Christel Ruddy

The late Douglas Adams is best known as the author of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy science fiction series. Mark Carwardine is a zoologist, photographer, and writer who is primarily known for this book and the related BBC radio and television productions.

Those familiar with Hitchhiker’s Guide will need no explanation of Adams’ rather dark and dry humor. Those who are not may be puzzled by references to towels, improbability, and the number forty-two by us fans. Regardless of which category the reader is in, this book is worth a look.

Adams and Carwardine decide to take an extended trip to attempt to see the world’s most endangered animal species. Their adventures were originally told as a BBC radio series, with most of the episodes eventually written down as the basis for this book. Two were omitted due to Adams’ inability to meet deadlines. (He famously said: “"I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.") The book is the story of their wanderings, and a compelling argument for continued conservation efforts.

This book was written in 1990, so more than 20 years have passed since Adams and Carwardine conducted their searches. In that time, one of the species (the Yangtze River Dolphin) has probably gone extinct, and a few of the others remain critically endangered. For others, however, their numbers are on the increase, largely as a result of conservation efforts. Thus, the book is both heartening and disheartening.

Adams appears to have done most of the writing, as the story is told from his point of view, and with his characteristic humor.

Adams also wrote from a purely naturalistic point of view, which leads to a few philosophical inconsistencies. The first is a typical conundrum: if everything came into being through random mutation and natural selection, extinction should be considered to be a natural and even desirable event. Why attempt to preserve that which is not fit, or at least not the fittest?

The second inconsistency is raised by Adams himself in a musing on question of evil. From a purely philosophical point of view, Adams does not consider evil as being any more than an opinion, a result of rules made by human thought. On the other, he clearly believes that certain other people are evil. For example, he believes that those who thoughtlessly kill endangered animals are evil. He also has nothing but loathing for gauche tourists, although he admits that he cannot come up with a legitimate reason for his belief. At least Adams is honest enough to admit the inconsistency.

The reader’s opinion of the writing style will probably depend on his or her tolerance for dry, snarky humor. This book has much in common with Mark Twain’s travelogues, although it is not nearly as detailed or polished. At his worst, Adams begins to sound like Marvin, the depressed robot, who is more tolerable as a fictional character than as a narrator. At his best, however, Adams is delightful. For example, in speaking of the bureaucracy left behind in post-colonial Africa: “You can always tell an ex-colony from the inordinate numbers of people who are able to find employment stopping anybody who has anything to do from doing it.”

This book looks more imposing that it is, with thick pages and largish print making for a quick read. It succeeds in bringing the raw edge of last-ditch conservation to life. For those of us who view the world as a creation, it is a sobering reminder of what we have lost, and what we could never see again.