Transforming a successful novel into an enduring media franchise requires more than just skill or luck. It requires a magnificent first sequel. Every subsequent entry in the series can run the gamut from brilliant to horrible, but that second book must sing.
The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe does just that, beginning with a clever title whose double meaning becomes a fascinating storyline in its own right. But it is just a small part of the rich pageant on offer. Douglas Adams delivers a book even more conceptual, expansive and hilarious than what came before.
This is the book that turned Adams’s brainchild into a cultural touchstone; it’s also a terrific read.
At the heart of what makes Restaurant so good is something that was also present in the original Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, just not at the same high level: Tone. Adams’s mastery of understatement and his playful formality reaches a level of wonder where you can almost read the mordant inflections on the page:
“Even if it’s only a dream, it’s a pretty horrible idea,” said Mella, “destroying a world just to make a bypass.”
“Oh, I’ve heard of worse,” said Ford, “I read of one planet off in the seventh dimension that got used as a ball in a game of intergalactic bar billiards. Got potted straight into a black hole. Killed ten billion people.”
“That’s mad,” said Mella.
“Yes, only scored 30 points too.”
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| "Zowee, here we are at the End of the Universe and you haven't even lived yet," Zaphod tells Arthur. Intergalactic dining is available here on Earth; only the prices are out of this world at Epcot Center in Orlando, Florida. Image from https://www.space220fla.com/ |
“Hitchhiker” fans will correctly point out a radio series laid the trail before any novels, and there was also a BBC-TV series in the mix. The success isn’t just literary. But the novels are how the franchise has been passed down; of them, this second book is the best.
That is not something I write easily, even though I know it to be true. The first book, the one which gives the series its name, and sets up the concept of Earth’s destruction and the subsequent travels of its only two survivors, is really, really funny by itself. But for a space-travel novel, it doesn’t have much of a plot. It works, but it doesn’t suck you in.
In The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, the narrative is in constant motion. If our protagonists in the spaceship Heart of Gold remain underdeveloped, they get a lot more to do in this volume, in set-pieces as funny and even more thrilling than the first time out.
The Heart of Gold is equipped with something called an “Improbability Drive,” making it “the most powerful and unpredictable ship in existence.” As Adams off-handedly explains: There was nothing it couldn’t do, provided you knew exactly how improbable it was that the thing you wanted it to do would ever happen.
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| "Like all Vogon ships it looked as if it had been not so much designed as congealed," Adams writes. Such a ship encounters the Heart of Gold in Chapter 1 of Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, only to be foiled by the mysterious Improbability Drive. Image [a rather nifty 3-D simulation] from https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/vogon-constructor-ship-8bee5a4c87a34ed5a69fdab9354ddf56 |
Over the course of 34 lightning-fast chapters, we follow Arthur, Trillian, their alien friends Zaphod Beeblebrox and Ford Prefect, and the bitterly depressed android Marvin as they bounce around the galaxy. Stops along the way include a skyscraper hurled into deep space, a Supreme Being who suffers from an extreme case of solipsism, and a visit by Zaphod to a chamber designed to destroy a person’s sense of self-worth by revealing his insignificance before the immensity of the universe.
For Zaphod, this last experience hardly goes as planned.
Adams explores the problems of time travel, not just becoming your own ancestor but linguistic stuff like what verb tense to use when talking about something your past self will eventually do but hasn’t yet. “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy skips lightly over this tangle of academic abstraction, pausing only to note that the term “Future Perfect” has been abandoned since it was discovered not to be,” Adams writes.
In Restaurant, we learn about the religion of the Jatravartids, who believe creation began with a sneeze and live in fear of “The Great White Handkerchief.” We learn that the population of the universe is effectively nil, Earth or no Earth: “Any finite number divided by infinity is as near to nothing as makes no odds, so the average population of all the planets in the Universe can be said to be zero.”
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| The cast of the original 1978-79 BBC Radio presentation of "Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy," genesis for the first two novels and still the only proper way to experience it, say diehard fans. The tall man third from right is Douglas Adams. Image from https://www.bbc.com/historyofthebbc/anniversaries/march/hitch-hikers-guide-to-the-galaxy |
Every chapter has its own nugget of unique information, its own development of the main plotline. As plotlines go, it is neither coherent nor consistent, but you do have galloping forward motion, a continual raising of the bar of absurdity set by Adams in the first book.
One of the many reasons Restaurant At The End Of The Universe stands out is for the way it develops Zaphod Beeblebrox, former President of the Galaxy, now a wanted fugitive for stealing the Heart Of Gold. He centers most of the action, and proves a livelier character here than either Arthur or Ford, mainly because he is so careless and self-assured:
“Hey, where did you say this building was flying to?” demanded Zaphod.
“The Frogstar,” said Roosta, “the most totally evil place in the universe.”
“Do you have food there?” said Zaphod.
“Food? You’re going to the Frogstar and you’re worried about whether they got food?”
“Without food I may not make it to the Frogstar.”
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| Near the end of the novel, we meet some of the citizens of Golgafrincham, who like to take baths, play bagpipes, burn trees and otherwise fritter away their lives on a strange, yet-uncivilized planet. "You're a load of useless, bloody loonies," Ford yells at them. Illustration by Jonathan Burton from https://www.foliosociety.com/uk/the-restaurant-at-the-end-of-the-universe |
The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe itself serves plenty of food for its fashionable clientele, who gather to watch exactly that, an extinction event that doubles as swank floor show. Because of the ubiquity of time travel, beings come from all corners of the universe, even one who is spending a year dead to avoid taxes. Dinner can consist of an animal who tells diners which parts of its body are best to eat:
“I just don’t want to eat an animal that’s standing there inviting me to,” said Arthur. “It’s heartless.”
“Better than eating an animal that doesn’t want to be eaten,” said Zaphod.
Adams’s conceptual humor is developed and then disposed of with equal dispatch. He dazzles you with his ideas and jokes simultaneously. That’s where the tone is so important. Because it is so relaxed and reserved, so British if you like, it functions like a character voice all its own.
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| In Restaurant, teleportation is not only a common form of transport but has also spawned its own protest music: "I'll gladly take the high road/Or even take the low,/But if you have to take me apart to get me there/Then I, for one, won't go." Image from https://www.thedailystar.net/bytes/shades-star-trek-quantum-teleportation-sets-distance-record-147517 |
The satire is very reminiscent of Jonathan Swift, where fantastical creations send up real-life situations. One planet, Ursa Beta Minor, conjures up a luxury-soaked 1980s Los Angeles where “it is nearly always Saturday afternoon just before the beach bars close.” Denizens tell one another to “have a nice diurnal anomaly.”
In another part of the galaxy, a group of marketing people stranded on a nearly-deserted planet argue about what to invent first, the wheel or fire. Says one: “We’ve got to find out what people want from fire, how they relate to it, what sort of image it has for them.”
As with The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, the many story detours sometimes bump into dead ends, such as Zaphod’s quest to find the Meaning of Life. For Adams, life was meaningless, and thus any search for meaning a nihilistic joke. But the pace of the book is so relentless, there is hardly time to feel cheated. You have a good time.
Nihilism is something you have to adjust for reading Adams, unless that happens to be your bag. He called himself a “radical atheist,” and while that wasn’t as pronounced as it became, various alien religions and traditions are ruthlessly mocked. Yet Restaurant At The End Of The Universe is not an alienating read. People do die en masse, but there also is something of an afterlife, an après vie as it is called. Zaphod confers with his great-grandfather from the Great Beyond, who complains he never got flowers. There is a sense of hope, baseless as it may be:
“In an infinite Universe anything can happen,” said Ford, “even survival. Strange but true.”
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| Marvin places a call to Zaphod from across the galaxies after another of a series of abandonments in a scene from the 1981 BBC-TV series. Zaphod is hardly a sympathetic owner. "Stay out of this, Marvin, this is organism talk." GIF from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/88735055133182121/ |
In Restaurant Adams’s most successful stab at existential comedy is Marvin the Android, a core character struck by the general futility of it all. He is used here sparingly but well. Left behind by a time-travelling Zaphod at the dawn of time, he complains when they meet at the End Of The Universe about the banality of his long wait:
“The first ten million years were the worst,” said Marvin, “and the second ten million years, they were the worst too. The third ten million years I didn’t enjoy at all. After that I went into a bit of a decline.”
Arthur and Ford, the original duo at the outset of the first novel, get to wrap up this second novel, back on the same planet where it all began, funny enough. This lends a completeness to just these two volumes. No doubt it was what Adams intended, as it mirrors the BBC scripts.
Still,
there is a lack of total finality in how things are left off, with characters
left hanging and situations not so much resolved as trailing off in different
directions. Adams famously took five books to complete his trilogy, and much of
its charm lies in the obvious, careless whimsy of his disconnected design. Because
he makes it so much fun, even playing upon and spotlighting the utter chaos of
it all, it works as meta-commentary on the ridiculous precariousness of
existence itself.
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