Douglas Adams' Mostly Harmless (Book Review)
Depression, it’s been claimed, sometimes triggers spurts of creativity, particularly in writers and musical artists. Either that or it inspires creative people later on to give the world memorable songs or poems – such as Jerome Kerns’ “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” or Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam.”
Unfortunately for fans of the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy five-volume “trilogy,” the author’s bout with the blues didn’t help much in the writing of Mostly Harmless, the bleak, somewhat underwhelming final book in the series.
As in the previous four novels, Adams pokes fun at various science fiction themes, mainly the concept of parallel universes and the notion that aliens have been monitoring the Earth’s various television and radio broadcasts since the mid-20th Century. And of course, as in the other volumes, Adams also makes various brilliantly funny observations about life in the Universe…or in New York City:
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
At first, Mostly Harmless seems to be a promising continuation of the misadventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Tricia McMillan – or Trillian – and the rest of the zany Hitchhiker’s troupe. Adams explores the bizarre notion of parallel universes by having Tricia going back for a handbag at a crucial moment, and this somehow changes the fate of the Earth so (a) it doesn’t get blown away by the Vogons and (b) some of the events in the previous entries of the wildly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy are hereby negated.
While Tricia, now a successful television reporter for a BBC-like network, copes with her failure to get a job with an American network in New York and returns home to Britain, she encounters the seemingly mindless crew of an alien spacecraft that has been orbiting Rupert, the solar system’s tenth planet, not knowing its mission, yet monitoring all the Earth’s broadcasts. When she agrees to help the Grebulons, she sets out on a bizarre set of adventures through various alternate universes and comes across a daughter she was previously unaware of, a wild and angry girl named Random.
Arthur, meanwhile, has been stuck on the primitive planet Lamuella and is making a living as a creator of, um, sandwiches. He hasn’t had much good luck since the start of the series, what with having been the only survivor from Earth in one alternate universe and losing, in a bizarre manner, the love of his life, Fenchurch, who he had last been seen with at the end of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish.
As for the other characters, Adams only mentions Ford Prefect, who is back at work as a roving reporter for the Guide…and he’s not very happy about it either. Gone is the happy-go-lucky, Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster-swigging, hitchhiker-friendly publication Ford had once written the phrase “mostly harnless” for. Now it’s a “politically correct” entity, and it has become all-powerful and all-knowing as well.
In typically incomprehensible turns of plot, Ford eventually turns against his employers and steals the new version of the Guide, which changes hands several times and sets off a disastrous sequence of events that leads to the bizarre fulfillment of a dark prophecy from one of the earlier novels.
Even the most ardent of Adams’ fans will read Mostly Harmless and come away with the feeling that this wasn’t the sort of ending they expected for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. For one thing, its brilliant comic riffs are offset by an uncharacteristically dark and morose tone; the loss of Fenchurch and the arrival on scene of Random are too jarring and too bleak in contrast to Adams’ earlier books. Many readers, this reviewer included, became rather fond of “Fenny” and were glad to see Arthur find some sort of happiness at last, only to find out that she was taken away by the bizarre random vagaries of the Universe.
Another weakness of the novel is the absence of Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android from the plot. Maybe Adams was too depressed and forgot to create a subplot for these long-running characters, or maybe he figured he’d given them enough time on stage – as it were – and left them out on purpose. Whatever the reason, the absence from Mostly Harmless of the hip, womanizing two-headed ex-President of the Galaxy and the morose robot is keenly felt.
Because Adams’ death in May 2001 precluded a possible sixth novel, Mostly Harmless will remain the final complete work of the series. It still packs some of Adams’ trademark wry humorous punch, but its dark and turbulent undercurrent of bleakness will, in the end, disappoint even the most fervent fan of the various Hitchhiker’s works.
(c) 2012 by Alex Diaz-Granados. All Rights Reserved.
Unfortunately for fans of the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy five-volume “trilogy,” the author’s bout with the blues didn’t help much in the writing of Mostly Harmless, the bleak, somewhat underwhelming final book in the series.
As in the previous four novels, Adams pokes fun at various science fiction themes, mainly the concept of parallel universes and the notion that aliens have been monitoring the Earth’s various television and radio broadcasts since the mid-20th Century. And of course, as in the other volumes, Adams also makes various brilliantly funny observations about life in the Universe…or in New York City:
One of the extraordinary things about life is the sort of places it’s prepared to put up with living. Anywhere it can get some kind of grip, whether it’s the intoxicating seas of Santraginus V, where the fish never seem to care whatever the heck kind of direction they swim in, the fire storms of Frastra, where, they say, life begins at 40,000 degrees, or just burrowing around in the lower intestine of a rat for the sheer unadulterated hell of it, life will always find a way of hanging on in somewhere.
It will even live in New York, though it’s hard to know why. In the wintertime the temperature falls well below the legal minimum, or rather it would do if anybody had the common sense to set a legal minimum. The last time anybody made a list of the top hundred attributes of New Yorkers, common sense snuck in at number 79.
At first, Mostly Harmless seems to be a promising continuation of the misadventures of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Tricia McMillan – or Trillian – and the rest of the zany Hitchhiker’s troupe. Adams explores the bizarre notion of parallel universes by having Tricia going back for a handbag at a crucial moment, and this somehow changes the fate of the Earth so (a) it doesn’t get blown away by the Vogons and (b) some of the events in the previous entries of the wildly inaccurately named Hitchhiker’s Trilogy are hereby negated.
While Tricia, now a successful television reporter for a BBC-like network, copes with her failure to get a job with an American network in New York and returns home to Britain, she encounters the seemingly mindless crew of an alien spacecraft that has been orbiting Rupert, the solar system’s tenth planet, not knowing its mission, yet monitoring all the Earth’s broadcasts. When she agrees to help the Grebulons, she sets out on a bizarre set of adventures through various alternate universes and comes across a daughter she was previously unaware of, a wild and angry girl named Random.
Arthur, meanwhile, has been stuck on the primitive planet Lamuella and is making a living as a creator of, um, sandwiches. He hasn’t had much good luck since the start of the series, what with having been the only survivor from Earth in one alternate universe and losing, in a bizarre manner, the love of his life, Fenchurch, who he had last been seen with at the end of So Long and Thanks For All the Fish.
As for the other characters, Adams only mentions Ford Prefect, who is back at work as a roving reporter for the Guide…and he’s not very happy about it either. Gone is the happy-go-lucky, Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster-swigging, hitchhiker-friendly publication Ford had once written the phrase “mostly harnless” for. Now it’s a “politically correct” entity, and it has become all-powerful and all-knowing as well.
In typically incomprehensible turns of plot, Ford eventually turns against his employers and steals the new version of the Guide, which changes hands several times and sets off a disastrous sequence of events that leads to the bizarre fulfillment of a dark prophecy from one of the earlier novels.
Even the most ardent of Adams’ fans will read Mostly Harmless and come away with the feeling that this wasn’t the sort of ending they expected for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series. For one thing, its brilliant comic riffs are offset by an uncharacteristically dark and morose tone; the loss of Fenchurch and the arrival on scene of Random are too jarring and too bleak in contrast to Adams’ earlier books. Many readers, this reviewer included, became rather fond of “Fenny” and were glad to see Arthur find some sort of happiness at last, only to find out that she was taken away by the bizarre random vagaries of the Universe.
Another weakness of the novel is the absence of Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Paranoid Android from the plot. Maybe Adams was too depressed and forgot to create a subplot for these long-running characters, or maybe he figured he’d given them enough time on stage – as it were – and left them out on purpose. Whatever the reason, the absence from Mostly Harmless of the hip, womanizing two-headed ex-President of the Galaxy and the morose robot is keenly felt.
Because Adams’ death in May 2001 precluded a possible sixth novel, Mostly Harmless will remain the final complete work of the series. It still packs some of Adams’ trademark wry humorous punch, but its dark and turbulent undercurrent of bleakness will, in the end, disappoint even the most fervent fan of the various Hitchhiker’s works.
(c) 2012 by Alex Diaz-Granados. All Rights Reserved.
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