|  The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe. |
Douglas Adams is best known for his best-selling five-part trilogy, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. In fact, the vast majority of Adams' readers will say that The Guide (as it is called for short) is Adams's best book ever; what's more, many of them consider it to be the best book ever written, period.
Personally, while I really loved the Guide series (yes, even Mostly Harmless), I find Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency to be Adams' best (of those I've read, at least).
However, I was disturbed by the daunting style-parallels between Dirk Gently and The Guide. Dirk is just too much of Ford, and Richard is obviously Arthur Dent, running around Ford/Dirk and not knowing why on Earth (and elsewhere) all of this is happening to him. It goes as far as Ford/Dirk using identical wordings in similar situations -- for example, “It's okay, he's with me”, regarding Richard/Dent, to pass security. To top it all, Eddie and Marvin will make perfect friends with the Electric Monk and his horse.
| He believed in a door. He must find that door. The door was the way to... to...
The Door was The Way.
Good.
Capital letters were always the best way of dealing with things you didn't have a good answer to. |
The book will likely leave you with a few unanswered questions about the storyline; even for a time-travel story, it seems a bit messy at first. It is simply that many of the jokes and references made by Adams require quite a bit of general education to understand. (Hint: Kubla Khan never did have a second verse.) If the book left you a bit bewildered, I highly recommend the FAQ file edited by the people from alt.fan.douglas-adams, the newsgroup dedicated to the lovers of Adams's work.
This is probably the books' weakest point: while all the information required to understand it exists, not all of it appears in the book. A light, comic book should not require long texts of interpretation in order to be understood. An obscure joke or two, yes; references to supposedly common knowledge, okay; but not having the entire plot depend on such loose ends. After reading the FAQ, a second reading through the book is a thoroughly enjoyable experience.
For a long time, I was amused by similarities between this book and Douglas R. Hofstadter's G?¶del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (reviewed here). It seemed to me that Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was highly influenced by that book. So I wrote Douglas Adams, and got a short reply that boils down to: “No, not really.” (The complete reply appears below.) However, as more than one reader of this page had noted, writers sometimes tend to deny all external influences on their work, so
| If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands. |
Douglas Adams' reply to my query: |
Subject: Re: Dirk & GEB
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 97 21:11:07 +0100
From: Douglas Adams <askdna@tdv.com>
To: <talcohen@netvision.net.il>
9/6/97 9:51 am Tal Cohen wrote:
>Hello.
>
>I'd like to ask you a little something. How much did Douglas R.
>Hofstadter's “Godel, Escher, Bach” affect your work on Dirk Gently (the
>original novel)? I think those two books are, well, fundamentally
>interconnected.
>
> - Tal Cohen
> http://www.forum2.org/tal
>
No, not really. I did read the book, but thought that his view of Bach
was pretty thin and his humour was lamentable!
Best,
Douglas Adams | The Digital Village | http://www.tdv.com
Now, considering GEB's humor “lamentable” is sad, in my view. But Adams' writing style and sense of humor are radically different from Hofstadter's... |
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©1997-2007 by Tal Cohen, all rights reserved. [About]
