The Saturday Morning Post (153)

 

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  C

I'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.