The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe!

The saga of Arthur Dent and his allies resumes in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The bizarre qualities and salty nature of commentary on the human condition which informed the original novel continue here. Douglas Adams has not run out of targets for his acerbic satire. 

The story picks up as our heroes leave Magrathea having uncovered the singularly strange reason for Earth's existence. But soon enough Zaphod Beeblebrox and Marvin the Depressed Robot are separated from his allies and finds himself on the home world of the publishers of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Universe. There he finds danger as he is sent on a mission to find the the true "Ruler of the Universe" by the editor of the Guide, a chap named Zarniwoop. Alien forces attack him and the homeworld of the Guide in an attempt to stop Zaphod. After much ballyhoo he ends up eventually reunited with Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, and Trillian aboard the Heart of Gold. They end up at Milliways, the titular restaurant and there meet some folks they know such Hotblack Dasiato, the leader of a band called Disaster Area, the loudest band in the universe. The quartet are contacted by Marvin who has been waiting for them for millions of years and the five of them get into a handsome black vehicle which it turns out is intended to enter a sun. They escape but are separated and we follow Arthur and Ford as they find themselves on the "B Ark" of a race called the Golgafrinchams. The art is filled with silly people who served little purpose in society and with that lot our boys end up crashlanding on a planet which as it turns out is Earth, still young. The search for the ultimate question proves frustrating and our two heroes resign themselves to a life under very primitive conditions.

I'm of course leaving out a lot of stuff here, and that's intentional. Adams doesn't write stories which are rich in plot necessarily, but merely some thread of a plot that he can hang his weird characters on which gives him an outlet for his caustic comments on humanity. The harsh truth though is that this sequel is not as good as the original. From what I can learn Adams had a very frenetic creative process and writing these novels was not high on his list. The story here feels frankly padded to make it come out to a short novel length. The early stuff with Zaphod (much of which I skipped over in my quick reprise) was rather confusing and frankly less interesting because to me Zaphod is not a character I invest in. Arthur is the centerpiece and when the stories stray from him, they lose that everyman perspective that makes the oddities feel even more odd.

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