If there's one thing that stands out to me about Douglas Adams, it's his ability to make the universe seem utterly attainable. One could say that his literary strength is the scope of his imagination and the passages he creates are fantastic, wondrous, and mind expanding. I think his skill lies in making the every day activities of mundane life seem rife with charm, magic, and deeper meaning... he makes the impossibilities of the universe fully tangible. I first read his novel Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy when I was in high school, and I remember being astounded by how bizarre his ideas were but how much sense they made to me nonetheless. His characters are flawed in the best sense - they are not great heroes but rather humble ones who are often thrown in the path of adversity, tragedy, and most often the paths of other strange characters who sweep them up into something that truly has nothing to do with them but once they're in, they don't have much choice in the matter... I suppose you could say that I'm a bit of a Douglas Adams fangirl. I celebrate Towel Day two days before my birthday. I have the oldest copies of his novels and I can't bear to replace them with newer versions, which is crazy considering I've got three different copies of The Picture Of Dorian Gray. This book, however, drove me nuts. I won't lie, I don't like Dirk Gently. I think he's one of the most annoying main characters I've ever come across. It's lucky he's so damn eccentric that he manages to keep your interest with his completely sideways approach to everything and everyone. He's a tangential weirdo. Perhaps Adams manages to get around his prickly "hero" by making sure that the Gently novels are written from the view of another character to which the events of the story inexplicably occur. This particular novel does a little bit of point of view sharing - we do experience chapters specifically from Dirk, from the main character Richard, an "Electric Monk" whose sole purpose in life is to believe in things. One character is a ghost. Despite a look in from the perspective of each character involved at some point or other, the events of the story are utterly bewildering As annoying or helpless as some of the characters are, the writing itself is brilliant... and also annoying? I was taken on a journey that I had no inkling of what the outcome might be. The resolution came suddenly in the last five pages and somehow raised more questions than it had answered, ending of course, with Dirk Gently continuing to be a frustrating jerk to his clients. Adams gets me with imagery though.
"In the darkness, the red telephone receiver slipped and slid fitfully back across the desk. If anybody had been there to see it they might just have discerned a shape that moved it. It shone only very faintly, less than would the hands of a luminous watch. It seemed more as if the darkness around it was just that much darker and the ghostly shape sat within it like thickened scar tissue beneath the surface of night." The way that he writes insane narratives about mostly normal people or weaving mundane circumstance with the edges of the unnatural, supernatural or science fiction worlds seems to be a winning combination for him. It sure gets me every time. No matter how annoying I found Dirk, I kept picking up the book, I kept reading it on breaks at work, on the train home, stayed up late one night to finish a few more chapters. HOW YOU DO THIS ADAMS? I can only speculate about how I think my brain is drawn to certain writing styles, but I've got another couple of his books that I haven't read and I'm in a phase with reading where I find it difficult to choose what to go for next. Do I pick up the next book because the first was a great read, or do I save it because once I've read it I can never experience it for the first time twice? I still haven't read Jane Eyre, the final Skullduggery Pleasant book, Wuthering Heights or The Handmaids Tale. These are books I'm desperate to have experienced not because I hold them in lofty regard but because I've heard consistently how they can effect their readers. Maybe not so much Skulduggery Pleasant, that's a bit of a weird young adult fantasy novel, but I'm still saving the end of the series because of reasons I surely cant even admit to myself. Pick up one of your oldest To Be Read books and finish it. It will be rewarding in ways you can't begin to imagine, or even if it's shit, you'll have finished something you told yourself you wanted to do a long time ago and you can bask in that self satisfaction all you like. Final verdict - 7 out of 10 because Dirk was so damn annoying.
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