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Mostly Harmless | Rating | |
| D | |||
| Douglas Adams | |||
| Series | Related Books | ||
| The Hitchhiker's Trilogy | The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Life, the Universe and Everything, So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish, Mostly Harmless | ||
Now that Arthur Dent and Ford Prefect have seen God's last words to his creation, they've gone their own ways once more. Ford returned to the offices of the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy, except that it's not quite the lace he once knew. It's been taken over by a bunch of bureaucrats, for one thing, and it might not even be the same building anymore. Arthur, meanwhile, is trying to return to Earth with the love of his life. Except that the love of his life disappeared out of the seat next to him during a perfectly routine hyperspace jump, and the Earth he has returned to is not the one he left. Not even the one he left the second time. He keeps finding different Earths, but none of them are home. Meanwhile, Tricia McMillan has a perfectly respectable career as a television personality, having never gone into space with a freewheeling galactic president named Zaphod.
Obviously, something screwy is going on.
Because of all these changes and probabalistic mucking around, Mostly Harmless has only the most tenuous of ties to the previous books. There's almost no need whatsoever to read any of the previous four books. I was particularly disappointed in Adams' striking of Fenchurch from the roster. She was a splendid addition to the cast, and gave Arthur some real stability. He had a compatriot in her. Now she's gone as if she'd never been. Other than a line or two, she isn't ever thought about.
Adams has a very light style that makes the book easy to read. His devil-may-care attitude towards logic shines through. But it's just not funny. Without the humor to act as a buffer, the book seems to wander, and the weirdness isn't nonsense - it just doesn't make sense, which is entirely different. But while the story seems to wander, there's not as many tangents as one would expect from an Adams book. There's too much plot to allow it. But without the silly side exposition that somtimes gives flavor to a scene and sometimes just adds humor and sometimes is actually important information the reader needs to know, it doesn't really seem like it's by the same person who did The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
Lastly, I hate the ending. Absolutely loathe it. Part of it is because it come on so suddenly. Everything's going well - or as well as it ever does in this setting, anyway - and suddenly blam! And part of that is because we care about Ford and Arthur, and this is a pretty conclusive conclusion. I got the distinct impression, between the last book and this one, that Adams was tired of people requesting the next book in the series, and so he ended it the way he did so that a sixth book would be impossible. I'm given to understand that's wrong, that he was actually working on book six when he died. But he is dead, and so this is the end of things. And I must say, it's a pretty crappy way for everything to wrap up, after all they went through.
The first three, the initial trilogy, is great. But I really recommend people stop reading at book three. Leave it there. Just stop. Don't read any more in this series. Books four and five are really not worth it. Really.
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