THE LATE Douglas Adams evidently thought that a universe devoid of any meaning could be consistently hilarious, but when author and critic Brian Stableford decided to look into the matter, he had some reservations . . .
The Subject:
The Critic:
The Focal Character:
Dirk Gently (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).
The Books:
(1) Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (1987) (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).
(2) The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988) (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).
(3) Adams made a third attempt at another Dirk Gently novel, The Salmon of Doubt (2002), but died before completing it (WARNING! SPOILERS! Wikipedia HERE).
The Article:
"The Big Sellers, 1 - Douglas Adams."
By Brian Stableford.
First appearance: Interzone, July-August 1989.
Critical review (4 pages).
Online at Archive.org (HERE).
"The Gently books are not really exercises in the detective genre because they are far too subversive of its parameters. Gently will have nothing of the Holmesian dictum that when you have eliminated the impossible whatever remains, however improbable, must be true."
WHEN today's article was published, Douglas Adams was just breaking away from novelizing adaptations of THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY radio and TV programs, making it . . .
". . . necessary to come up with something new, which would not need to live on borrowed charm, and what Adams came up with was Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (1987), whose spectacular success was quickly followed up by a sequel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (1988). Although they have not received universal critical acclaim — publication of the second volume of Dirk Gently’s exploits called forth a particularly ruthless demolition job by a Sunday Times reviewer — these books do serve to demonstrate that Adams’ career was by no means a flash in the pan, and that his humour is flexible enough to fit more than one literary template."
". . . [and so we have] Douglas Adams, who — at the ripe young age of 36 — must contemplate the prospect of spending half a lifetime being consistently funny. One can count on the fingers of one hand the number of writers who have actually managed that, and there would be at least a couple of fingers to spare."
"Comedy is fun; explanations of why jokes work are anything but funny. It is only natural that people who laugh at jokes should feel that investigation of why they have laughed is at best utterly irrelevant and at worst threatening — because once we become fully conscious of how and why we find things funny we might be prevented thereby from finding them funny in future."
"If there is anything which is ruthlessly and repeatedly asserted by Adams’ anecdotes and vignettes it is that when you try to figure out what it all means, all you get is a poke in the ego."
"It hardly needs to be observed that underneath the jokiness this is really a rather bleak view of things."
"Given that the world-view of modern science provides such convincing back-up for Adams’ assertions regarding our utter triviality it is perhaps surprising that sf in general (whose supposed mission is, after all, to explore what lies at and beyond the horizons of the scientific imagination) usually goes in the opposite direction."
"The main problem with bathetic humour is that every time you move from the sublime to the ridiculous it gets harder to scale the heights of sublimity again. There comes a time when you have shot the last sacred cow in the herd, and there is nothing sufficiently grandiose left to be worth dissolving in the acid-bath of callous banality."
"The world-view of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is a much more cheerful one than the world-view of the Hitch-Hiker books, and despite his chaotic lifestyle Dirk Gently is here essentially a winner . . . but The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul . . . is much closer in tone to the later Hitch-Hiker books."
"The anarchic comedians of today have found no order to assault which is anywhere near as resilient; nowadays subversion is usually too effective for its own good."
"It is in intricate and intriguing patterns of connection rather than continually crushing revelations of meaninglessness that the prospects of future delight will lie."
References:
- "not dissimilar in spirit to the Anthropic principle":
"The principle was formulated as a response to a series of observations that the laws of nature and parameters of the universe have values that are consistent with conditions for life as it is known rather than values that would not be consistent with life on Earth. The anthropic principle states that this is an a posteriori necessity, because if life were impossible, no living entity would be there to observe it, and thus it would not be known. That is, it must be possible to observe some universe, and hence, the laws and constants of any such universe must accommodate that possibility." (Wikipedia HERE.)
- "the Apocalypse" (Wikipedia HERE).
- "the Age of Reason" (Wikipedia HERE).
- "P. G. Wodehouse" (Wikipedia HERE).
The bottom line:
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