More. I need more. I need more Douglas Adams. While not as good as the Hitchhiker's Guide, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul was a wonderful and fantastical read. I haven't read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency yet, but I listened to the BBC radio version of it. I think I liked this one more, although I reserve the right to switch once I've actually read the book. That being said, I find that although I love reading his books, the endings always seem to leave me unsatisfied. I don't know if that is because they end so abruptly and neatly and that is somehow unsatisfying or if it is merely that I don't want the story to end. But, as with Hitchhiker's Guide, there are a number of things I want to write down to use later in my own writing.
I love the way Adams describes ordinary things and makes them monstrous. Some of the best descriptions in this book are about airports, pizza and windshield wipers. For instance, the book opens with the line "It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on Earth has ever produced the expression 'as pretty as an airport'" (Adams, 1). And then the notion continues on about the purposefulness of the architect in creating a certain aesthetic quality about every airport, "They have sought to highlight the tiredness and crossness motif with brutal shapes and nerve-jangling colours, to make effortless the business of separating the traveler for ever 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 functional, and conceal the location of the departure gates, presumably on the grounds that they are not" (Adams, 1). I love it. On the first page of the book, he has made the airport a villain and exposed the whole of airport architecture as a sinister plot to shield the airlines from their unfortunate record of departing on time.
As for the pizza notion, he described some of the best nostalgia for an ex-pat and it really struck a chord with me. Its truth and humor are inextricable. "She enjoyed the notion that New York was home, and that she missed it, but in fact the only thing she really missed was pizza. And not just any old pizza, but the sort of pizza they brought to your door if you phoned them up and asked them to. That was the only real pizza (Adams, 3). I think this simple notion of nostalgia would play somewhere well in Future Modern Ancient Greeks. Take something that seems mundane, like flipping channels on a TV or the emergency broadcast system interrupting an exciting live sporting event at exactly the inopportune moment and describe it this way.
The final mundane and ordinary that Adams turns into the extraordinary and imaginative that I wish to highlight is the description of windshield wipers on Dirk's elderly Jaguar. "Furthermore it came on to rain a little, which should have helped... Dirk turned on the car wipers which grumbled because they didn't have quite enough rain to wipe away, so he turned them off again. Rain quickly speckled the windscreen. He turned on the wipers again, but they still refused to feel that the exercise was worthwhile, and scraped and squeaked in protest" (Adams, 157).
Adams, as a "radical atheist" obviously has a slightly different take on religion than I do, but his skewering of it is still a fascinating read. Again, describing the absolute horrors of airport existence for travelers, Adams notes "This, she reflected, in a continuation of her earlier train of thought, was presumably how religions got started, and must be the reason why so many sects hang around airports looking for converts. They know that people there are at their most vulnerable and perplexed, and ready to accept any kind of guidance" (Adams, 5). Another little section reflects Adams (and a fundamental atheistic value) that religion was created by man for man, but in his style, he turns it into a farce. "If she could have been transported to where she might see her secretive patient enthroned, warrior father of the warrior Gods of Asgard, she would not have been surprised. That is not quite true, in fact. She would have been startled quite out of her wits. But she would at least have recognised that it was consistent with the qualities she perceived in him, once she had recovered from the shock of discovering that virtually everything the human race had ever chosen to believe in was true. Or that it continued to be true long after the human race particularly needed it to be true any more" (Adams, 62).
There's a lot in that last bit. First, it assumes that religion is man-made and that the gods are anthropomorphic. Second, because Adams is writing comedy it throws out there that what humans believe is true becomes true. That's an interesting philosophical notion about rationalism in and of itself. But, the consequence of this is that the gods continue to exist even after humanity has no longer deemed it necessary for them to exist. That's a funny concept. But, also the fact that Sister Bailey would have been startled out of her wits to see the existence of such beings is an interesting indictment of faith.
Moving on to other things, the description of how Dirk Gently wakes up had me laughing out loud. "The sheets and blankets were pulled up tightly around his head, but from somewhere half-way down the length of the bed a hand slowly emerged from under the bedclothes and its fingers felt their way in little tapping movements along the floor. Working from experience, they neatly circumvented a bowl of something very nasty that had been sitting there since Michaelmas, and eventually happened upon a half-empty pack of untipped Gauloises and a box of matches. The fingers shook a crumpled white tube free of the pack, seized it and the box of matches, and then started to poke a way through the sheets tangled together at the top of the bed, like a magician prodding at a handkerchief from which he intends to release a flock of doves. The cigarette was at last inserted into the hole. The cigarette was lit. For a while the bed itself appeared to be smoking the cigarette in great heaving drags. It coughed long, loud and shudderingly and then began to breathe in a more measured rhythm. In this way, Dirk Gently achieved consciousness" (Adams, 21). What an introduction of a character. Magnificent.
Lastly, upon describing how the airport accident occurred I found something that might work well as an homage to Adams in the Future Modern Ancient Greeks. A politician described the accident as the airport check-in desk was "fundamentally fed up with being where it was". I thought that the traveler and the doctor in Future Modern Ancient Greeks could fit this description as to how their bodies and souls got separated. And, since the soul is the form of the body the separation caused the body to lose its shape and become mushy mass. It also would explain why the traveler looked an awful lot like a human stencil before the reconciliation.
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