I was disappointed in the fourth novel in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy. So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish feels much too normal to be a Hitchhiker book. It's a romance and is full of naturalistic scenes of relatively normal conversation. There is the occasional oddment but by and large the book seems pretty normal. And that's a worry.
We follow our hero Arthur Dent back to Earth where he finds things startlingly normal on Earth. Even his house is ready for habitation, though it shows evidence he's been gone for a long time. The center of the story is Fenchurch or Fenny as he is also called by her brother. Fenchurch is the woman who is referenced in the very first novel who came to an incredible enlightenment just before the Vogons destroyed the Earth. Now we find her alive as are all of the earthlings with no memory of the Vogons. But she has hallucinations. Arthur falls in love with her and seeks her out. They discover they both can fly and we get scenes of them having sex among the clouds. Then the clue of a fishbowl sent to both of them sends them to California to consult a man who is generally considered nuts. With his help they find out why the Earth is returned. Then they get a hankering to leave Earth and just then Ford Prefect shows up. And poor old Marvin even puts in an appearance.
It's as if Adams was taking that all-purpose towel and wringing it out yet one more time. The viable fluid is getting thinner and thinner. For all the wild inventiveness which makes the original radio play such a delight (and the early novels as well) there seems to little of it here. Adams seems to be happier with life and that comes through as well. Good for him, I'm glad he found some measure of delight. But the brew which wrought the Hitchhiker's Guide was not a brew concocted of happiness, but of world weariness with heaping helpings of sarcasm. This is true love it seems, and good for them. But it left me a bit flat.
There is one more novel and before that a single short story. More on those later.
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I remember reading this and being very confused. I had read the previous books by borrowing them from the library and didn't really remember where they ended up. So this book's connection to the previous three was not at all clear to me. The cartoon logic of being able to fly by forgetting to fall is fun and has stuck with me all these years.
ReplyDeleteHaving just read all five of the Adams Hitchhiker books, it's pretty clear that trying to make sense of them book to boo is a fool's errand. He admits they contradict themselves, so I just tried to put it out of my mind. The flying was a nifty touch and one of the more elegant inventions of the books.
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