4. And Another Thing...

By: Eion Colfer

I'm not sure whether to blame short term memory or willful delusion to explain why I'd go and read yet another Douglas Adams style book by someone other than Douglas Adams. However, seeing as this is the 'official' sixth book in the even more now inappropriately named Hitchhiker trilogy, and seeing as the last book, Mostly Harmless ends on a bit of a downer, I felt the need to plow on, even if the franchise was handed over to new management.

Admittedly, the first chapter or so fooled me- it does start off quite good. Even the title is clever- like all the other books (since the first) the title is a reference to one of the books that it followed. In this case the title comes from the line in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish:

The storm had now definitely abated, and what thunder there was now grumbled over more distant hills, like a man saying "And another thing…" twenty minutes after admitting he's lost the argument.

The suggestion being that this book, in itself, is an unneeded post-script that will add nothing to the existing canon. You have to appreciate that kind of self-depricating irony. The first chapter finds the main characters living lives of luxury before they are whisked back to their current reality- where we left off in Mostly Harmless (roll over for spoilers) in the midst of earth's second destruction. At first, Colfer does a pretty amazing job at recreating the feel of a true Adams novel; he captures the Arthur Dent that is somehow both constantly miserable and likable at the same time. He nails the Ford Prefect who is seems so genuinely deep because of his ridiculous shallowness. He gets the comic relief of Zaphod pretty quickly with a neat turn of events for that character. Trillian is probably the least well fleshed out in the new book, but to be fair, she's not all that well fleshed out in the original series either (I'd like to cite as evidence for this how radically different she's portrayed in the film and BBC versions of the original book- much more so than any of the other characters).

Unfortunately, after that things start to fall apart. Perhaps part of this came from Colfer's attempt to salvage some of the ideas in Salmon of a Doubt into a workable new book. Prehaps it stems from what feels like a need to fill the book with clever in-jokes and references to minor characters and events from the previous novels. More likely it comes from the return of small characters that were originally only intended as funny asides, not to be brought back as major players. Certainly it comes from a weak plot which reads more like a post-script (and another thing...) to the original story, rather than the big finale that Adams never had the chance to pen himself. I can't pinpoint exactly what the problem is, but I can pinpoint exactly where it started to fall apart for me- where the title is funny and ironically meta- he riffs on improbability in another way that might have also been self-depricating, but comes across as a treatise on the banality of Adams' humor. In a guide entry, he writes that just about any two words selected at random and put together will find tons of listings in the H2G2- and while this simple concept is at the heart of some of Adams' funny asides, its also to be found in the basic assumptions of Surrealism - that new ideas are generated when two unrelated ideas are juxtaposed. While the 'meta-ness' of the title is endearing to the point that you can actually allow someone else to pick up the story where Adams left off, this passage seemed poorly conceived and vaguely insulting to Adams' legacy. True, this juxtaposition of randomness is one thing that Adams does- but he does it so well. I don't doubt it was intended as an homage to his style, but unfortunately, it doesn't read that way.

Finally, while this book finds a happier ending then Mostly Harmless, it's not all that much happier, we don't learn anything new, but more importantly, nothing changes for the characters, and they don't learn anything new. I really wanted to like this book, but the best I can say for it is that it has some very funny bits strung together by a pretty weak plot, and that it is really much better than Starship Titanic.