This issue we have a rather weird book. For a change of pace. What the hell?My reviewer criteria. I like light, entertaining novels. I like smaller scale stories rather than epics. I like character focused novels featuring pleasant characters, with a minimum number of unpleasant ones. I greatly value clever and witty writing. I like first person, or close third person narratives. I dislike a lot of "head jumping" between POVs and flashbacks. I want a story, not a puzzle. While I am not opposed to violence, I dislike gore for the sake of gore. I find long and elaborate fight, action, and battle sequences tedious. Plot holes and things that happen for the convenience of the author annoy me. And I fear I'm a born critic in that I don't mind pointing out what I don't like in a story. However, I lay no claim to be the final arbitrator of style and taste, you need to decide for yourself what you like or dislike in a book.
Your opinions are always welcome. Comment below.
Dirk Gentry's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams CI've gone on record as saying that I don't like silly stories. And given that attitude, I probably should've given this book a miss. I read his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books, and found them, OK, but not hilarious, as some readers do. So I wasn't going into this book unprepared. Even so, it was a disappointment.
I did, however, stick with it to the end. I think the reason was that though the story itself is chaotic and silly, the writing is clever. If it had been a silly story with silly humor, I would've DNFed it rather quickly. But as someone who really appreciated the clever use of the English language, I put up with the nonsense story because I enjoyed the use of language. But, as you can see, not really all that much.
The story itself is, very disjointed and entirely unbelievable. It is mostly just a series of often seemingly unrelated episodes highlighting Adam's humor in various locales and with various characters, all loosely strung together into some resemblance of a plot, the importance of which is entirely unimportant. From the title, I had been under the impression that it would feature an unconventional detective solving special crime(s). Now, to some extent this is true, but it is a fairly minor element, and no believable way, indeed, understandable fashion. At least unless, perhaps, if you make a deep study of the story elements, which I am not inclined to do. Truthfully, I had to google the Wikipedia entry of this story just to figure out how it ended. And I'm still sure how they derive their interpretation. I'm not even convinced that what they claim is in the story, is actually in it.
I suppose I could outline the plot, but really, what's the point? Why try to impose order on chaos? You may want to read it if you enjoy the Monty Python style humor. The alleged plot is just a scaffolding to hold it up this exercise in humor. There is a second Dirk Gentry novel, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul, and the third one completed by another writer after Adams' death, neither of which I will be reading. Once is enough.
I really liked parts of the Hitchhiker's Guide series. Other parts were a slog. Never read this one.
ReplyDeleteWhat I really want to know, though, is how you define silly vs. clever humor. For example, I'm assuming you would describe Wodehouse as very clever, but not silly. Personally, I would view some of his stories as pretty silly (I'm thinking about the cow creamer here), but I'm thinking we must have subtly different ideas of what "silly" is. I mean, I can recognize extremes, like Monty Python, as being very, very silly. But where, exactly, do we draw the line?
A hard question to answer. For me, one dividing line is plausibility vs implausibility. Bertie's Wooster's problems and adventures are silly and slight. But I can imagine Bertie as a real live person whose character and stories have been exaggerated for comic effect. On the other side of that divide is one of your favorite authors, Zack Shatzer. I've sampled them, and cannot imagine the characters or premises to be exaggerations of real life. He has no interest in making them plausible, which is no doubt the point. But I find them too implausible to become invested in either the characters or setting. Maybe the dividing line is that I'm just less imaginative than you. I need some grounding in real life to enjoy a story.
DeleteThe other element is that, as I have said before, I value the understated, including in writing. By clever writing, I mean people who can use the English language in unexpected, and humorous ways, but also in a quiet and unexpected sort of way. But once again, there is a much broader way of writing humor, some of which strikes me as trying too hard. It's that understatement thing again.
Perhaps the perfect example of what I like is Jasper Fforde's Shades of Grey. It is a satire of sorts, where a lot of things are taken literally and to silly extremes, but there are also real characters that you can identify with as real people, despite the many silly premises of their society.
In the case of this book, Adams can use the English language in ways that I find clever and entertaining, but the story itself often just flies off into a strangeness that is not grounded in an sort of believable reality. Only his writing kept me reading.