Mostly Harmless (Hitchhiker's Trilogy (Audio))

Rating:
Summary: Fun Crazy House Ride
Review: * When I was going through my final fits of academic labor in the
summer of 1981, I was working on a summer-crash-course thermodynamics
class, work that kept me up late and reduced me to peculiar mental
states. As I closed my thermo text one night in such a state, I
turned on the radio only to hear ... THE HITCHHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE
GALAXY. It was appropriate to the moment and my outlook.

That wasn't the end of it, either. Now we have a fifth volume in "the
increasingly innaccurately named HitchHiker's Trilogy." In MOSTLY
HARMLESS, we see old friends: Ford Prefect, Trillian, Vogons, and of
course Arthur Dent -- and new faces: an insanely cheeful security
robot named Colin, galactic bar singers, Arthur's daughter Random (who
he had no idea existed), a group of aliens who observe Earth from a
distance but do not know why (having collectively and literally lost
their minds), an Earth where four-leaf-clovers are normal and
three-leaf-clovers are lucky, and, most important of all, a new and
much more sinister Guide.

MOSTLY HARMLESS continues the HITCHHIKER's tradition of imaginative
madness, but it differs from earlier parts of the series in two
respects. First, the story has a clever, coherent, and imaginative
underlying plot rationale, something that was largely absent in the
earlier elements of the series. In fact the whole thing resembles an
elaborate puzzle that you have to inspect carefully even when, in the
end, all the pieces have neatly clicked together.

Second, and much more important, in the end this is not a funny book
at all; there is the usual humor during the course of the trip, but
the destination is dark and despairing, and the usual sense of
insanity and fatalism that marks the earlier parts of the series seems
to be felt with conviction: events are incoherent; we understand
nothing; we are at the mercy of chance.

It is probably well, then, that MOSTLY HARMLESS is the end of
the series. Or is it? In a Universe of infinite improbabilities,
somewhere, someplace, infinite numbers of sequels are being
written. [Minor update of review from 1993.]

Rating:
Summary: Action, humour, SF satire and post-modern philosophy
Review: Always a lovely read - Adams is very user friendly. He seems to almost have his own genre of which he and Pratchett are the leading exponents. I can't say I laughed out loud too often (although the picture of a drunken Zaphod sticking a birdcage over his second head and badly pretending to be a pirate is hilarious), but it was a very pleasant ride - even if the conclusion is surprisingly bleak for what feels like a light comedy. Like Pratchett (and there are so many 'like Pratchett's, although that's probably in the wrong comparative order) Adams throws in some agnostic themes with his humour, although here the ultimate meaninglessness of life is treated a little less whimsically.

It's an interesting hotchpotch of action (and cutting between various cliff-hanger scenes), philosophy, stand-up comic perspectives of the everyday, domestic sit-com, satirical SF, and Douglas' own pleasure in blithely hurling his characters through six impossible things before breakfast. The plot is surprisingly coherent although occasionally incidental.

I still would almost be surprised if Adams didn't cite Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 as a thematic and stylistic influence. Here he lets his sensible and considerate astrologer state the theme that it doesn't matter so much what you believe in ('truth' is irrelevant), but you need something as a structure, a lens, to enable you to live satisfactorily. Adams unsurprisingly explains this much better:
"I know that astrology isn't a science ... of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis ... The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing the indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people."

'Discuss', huh.

Yet another author struggles to reconcile loss of faith in major, particularly religious, concepts of truth with the inner conviction that there are important, good and beautiful things all around - that it's not all just meaningless.

And it is a struggle, as in the climax (spoiler warning) Trillian explains to her traumatised daughter who desperately wants to know who she is, where her home is, where she 'fits':
This is not your home ... You don't have one. We none of us have one. Hardly anyone has one anymore. The missing ship I was just talking about. The people of that ship don't have a home. They don't know where they are from. The don't even have any memory of who they are or what they are for. The are very lost and very confused and very frightened.

Yeah, ha ha, good one Douglas - hardly Wodehouse light humour. Human condition anyone? I wonder if Adams and Pratchett self-consciously have wanted to be taken 'seriously'? I could see that it could be frustrating for them to be dismissed as merely lightweight because they're so popular. They often contain more articulate thought than works by more academic writers, and shouldn't be seen as lesser merely because they happen to also be very good at amusing and entertaining (quite the opposite). That being said, their books should also come with a flyleaf caveat: "Warning - strong post-modern agenda permeates the following jokes".

Rating:
Summary: With Love To DNA, This Book Is Mostly Unnecessary
Review: Don't let my 2-star rating for "Mostly Harmless" fool you---I miss Douglas Adams very much. He was a brilliantly funny author, and I'm a huge fan of his first four "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" books, his pair of "Dirk Gently" books, and his writing for the "Doctor Who" TV series. But sadly, I must confess, I'm not a fan of Adams' final "Hitchhiker's" book, "Mostly Harmless." The reason is simple: the fifth book, in my opinion, is totally unnecessary. Adams originally intended for the fourth book, "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish," to be the definitive final book in the "Hitchhiker's" saga. There's a *reason* why the fourth book has a farewell title to it, folks! And, like the three books that came before it, I totally loved it---I read the entire "So Long And Thanks..." book in a single day, and I thought that it was a marvelous "conclusion" to the adventures of Arthur Dent & company.Then along came "Mostly Harmless," which, by Adams' own admission, he only wrote on a whim---just for fun, in other words. He came up with a way to extend the series for one more book, which I'm sure delighted some "Hitchhiker's" fans, but I, personally, was so disappointed with the direction of it. Arthur's ladylove, Fenchurch, is gone, and now it turns out that he & Trillian had a daughter (though not by natural means), and that's just for starters. Oh, Adams' writing is still sharp, but despite a very humourous adventure with Ford Prefect & a companion robot toward the beginning, the fifth book, to my dismay, turns surprisingly serious. What can I say---this is simply not how I wanted the "Hitchhiker's" saga to end.I have on my bookshelf a "complete" hardcover edition of "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" that only goes up through "So Long And Thanks For All The Fish." That's fine with me. To me, "So Long" IS the definitive ending of the series. I just don't feel it was necessary for Douglas Adams to extend the story any further. Don't get me wrong, I greatly mourn the man, and I will always treasure his other works of genius, but "Mostly Harmless," for me, came up short. My advice: read the "Hitchhiker's" series through book four ONLY, and you will get a much more satisfying conclusion. But the misstep that is "Mostly Harmless" takes nothing away from the man's great literary gifts---and great laughs---that he gave us throughout his incredible writing career. So long, Douglas, and thanks for all the fish.

Rating:
Summary: For the love of Zarquon....
Review: This book was a decent read, but shy's in comparison to the first four of the series. The wacky zany and highly entertaining universe Adams created is somewhat unsettled by this book. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth for the dedicated fan. I am honestly lead to believe, after having read all of Adams' work, that another book was to follow this one. The issues of Fenchurch as well as there being two Trillian's in the end, plus the lack of Zaphod (with the Heart of Gold) just leaves the door open for a loop hole out of the disturbingly final tone to this book. A loophole I don't Adams was overlooking. While I can appreciate the ideas this book presented, I have to agree with some of the other reviewers here that the previous books filled you with a sort of hope that things would work out for poor and miserable Arthur Dent, as well as, finding it hard to believe that Ford Prefect couldn't find himself out of any difficult situation. While I don't know if I personally could ever get enough of the hitchhiker series, I'm indecisive as which book I would rather have as a finale......