Concluding a trilogy can’t be easy. A long train of character arcs, plot twists, themes, motifs, and denouements must be accounted for. That is unless you are Douglas Adams, and can surmount this challenge by entirely ignoring it with a barrage of random, winning silliness.
Not every reader can be bought off by cosmic gags or pratfalls without some closure as to what it all means. But take your pleasures in life where you can. You don’t have to love Life, The Universe And Everything to appreciate it for what it is rather than what it isn’t.
One thing it certainly isn’t is the end of the trilogy, third book or not.
In the beginning, Arthur Dent is back on Earth, stuck in a four-year prehistoric exile. Then a floating sofa speeds him and his alien friend Ford Prefect into the middle of a 1980s cricket game. Soon, aliens are raiding this game to make off with its accoutrements and trophies. These are intended to help them bring about the end of the entire Universe.
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| Modern cricket. The three blue sticks (called "stumps") and two tinier sticks (called "bails") resting over them are components sought by Krikkit to complete their plan. Earth, we are told, has been shunned by the rest of the Galaxy precisely for their invention of cricket. Photo by Clive Mason from https://www.britannica.com/sports/cricket-sport |
The wondrous inhabitants of the planet Krikkit sing beautifully and really enjoy nature. They just have a teensy blind spot:
“The idea of a Universe didn’t fit into their world picture, so to speak. They simply couldn’t cope with it. And so, charmingly, delightfully, intelligently, whimsically if you like, they decided to destroy it.”
With little preamble beyond that flying sofa, which is soon forgotten, this is the storyline for Life, The Universe And Everything. Originally developed by Adams separate from the “Hitchhiker” saga for an episode of the BBC-TV series “Dr. Who,” the killer Krikkiters feel an odd fit for the ambit of Dent & Co. But amiably random chaos had been central to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” since it began; why stop now?
What works in Life, The Universe And Everything begins with the jokes. This may be, page for page, the funniest entry in the entire series. It has some wonderfully absurdist quips and introduces some immediately classic characters and concepts, like how man can fly by just learning how to miss the ground. This idea even pays off in the story, as do some other gags, including a seeming random line from the first book.
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| While never made into a movie or TV series, Life, The Universe And Everything has been adapted in a series of comic books. Here we see Ford and Arthur running away from the robot army of Krikkit, which is how the main story begins. Image from https://en.whakoom.com/ediciones/589399/life_the_universe_and_everything_-_the_hitchhikers_guide_to_the_galaxy-softcover_48_pp |
Adams could still be frightfully clever. So what is the problem?
In a word, inertia. Life takes too long to get going and ends all too soon, with the main source of tension literally and inexplicably dissipating into a cloud of dust. I’m not spoiling anything, since the story doesn’t play at surprises or twists, just punchlines:
Just as Einstein observed that time was not an absolute but depended on the observer’s movement in space, and that space was not an absolute, but depended on the observer’s movement in time, so it is now realized that numbers are not absolute, but depend on the observer’s movement in restaurants.
This theory plays into how Dent and his companions jump through the galaxy: the Bistromathic Drive fudges limitations of space and time the same way a restaurant misplaces reservations and overbooks tables.
There is also the amazing journey of Wowbanger the Infinitely Prolonged, a being who deals with the curse of eternal life by flying through the galaxy insulting every living being, one at a time: “He imagined for a moment his itinerary connecting up all the dots in the sky like a child’s numbered dots puzzle. He hoped that from some vantage point in the universe it might be seen to spell a very, very rude word.”
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| At one point in the narrative, Arthur literally collides into a large, flying cocktail party which never ends. "The problem of when the drink is going to run out is, however, going to have to be faced one day," Adams writes. Image from https://www.therooftopguide.com/rooftop-news/top-10-party-rooftops-in-the-world.html |
Meanwhile, manic depressive robot Marvin finds himself stuck in a swamp arguing with a sentient carpet while two-headed unfiltered narcissist Zaphod Beeblebrox finds himself lost in space: “I can do anything I want only I just don’t have the faintest idea what.”
There is also a new creature named Agrajag who gets one of the greatest character build-ups I have read in some time. To say too much would be to spoil something you deserve to discover on your own; I will just give you this brief jewel of a line: Each of his three eyes was small and intense and looked about as sane as a fish in a privet bush.
The universe of Life, The Universe And Everything seems a lot smaller than it was in the first two books. Most of this book takes place on Earth at various time periods, with less space travel this time around. The device of quoting liberally from the actual “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” is absent, while the few new aliens we encounter vary only in their degrees of dangerousness.
Zaphod and Marvin, the two stars of the last book, get less screen time here, though Marvin makes his moments count. I loved his conversation with the carpet, which is maybe the funniest chapter in the book. Unfortunately, it’s nearly all you get with him.
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| Marvin the Android (seen here in his BBC-TV series form) does reappear at the end of Life, The Universe And Everything, where his glum personality becomes a source of salvation for the rest of the Universe. Marvin, of course, finds nothing in that to be cheerful about. Image from https://sketchfab.com/3d-models/marvin-the-paranoid-android-articulated-color-2c5381728d8241828146a357cd3d8f98 |
Trillian, Zaphod’s girlfriend in past volumes, has finally had enough of the guy and dumps him early on. For the first time in the series, she becomes her own character, teaming up with Arthur Dent to get at what the inhabitants of Krikkit are about. It’s nice to see some life in her; I just found her mindflash too easy and out of left field, like Adams was pushing another random button to wrap it up.
In the end, Adams seemed incapable of wanting to entertain anything too positive happening to his characters:
“Deep in the fundamental heart of mind and Universe,” said Slartibartfast, “there is a reason.”
Ford glanced sharply around. He clearly thought this was taking an optimistic view of things.
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| Author Douglas Adams. While ideas seem to effortlessly flow forth from the pages of his "Hitchhiker" books, writing itself was a painful chore for him. Once the market for his work was firmly established, he acquired a habit of missing publisher deadlines. Image from https://www.forbes.com/sites/sap/2014/07/07/douglas-adams-technology-rules/ |
The core deficiency of Life, The Universe And Everything comes back to structure. This is the first book in the series where the plotline had not been worked out in detail for multiple formats before becoming a book.
With both The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, the narratives were initially radio scripts and then teleplays, strung together with care and carefully designed cliffhangers. When they were finally made into books, entire sections had either been removed or tightened. The result was not universally preferred, but they were deeply thought out over a long period.
This, by contrast, was fairly new material. Adams had developed it as a movie script for “Dr. Who;” the way Arthur and Trillian team up in the end to bring about a happy ending resembles how the Doctor and his female companion had worked in countless serials.
Krikkit is an interesting idea for a planet, but it is neither well filled-out or developed. Adams later said it was meant to be a spoof of people who refuse to accept science, but at face value they feel like a missed opportunity. I see why the producers of “Dr. Who” didn’t go forward with Adams’s original script.
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| Adams later did write for "Dr. Who," including the serial "The City Of Death," featuring Lalla Ward as Romana and Tom Baker as the Doctor. "The City Of Death" is well-remembered by fans for its robust humor and a cameo appearance by John Cleese, with whom Adams had gotten his start writing for "Monty Python's Flying Circus." Image from https://www.douxreviews.com/2014/05/doctor-who-city-of-death.html |
Still, this is a fun book, especially when taken as a standalone than a continuation of a series. There is Adams’s explanation of the science behind the phenomenon of ignoring something because it is “Someone Else’s Problem” or this brief discursion into the nature of infinity:
Very few things actually get manufactured these days, because in an infinitely large Universe such as, for instance, the one in which we live, most things one could possibly imagine, and a lot of things one would rather not, grow somewhere. A forest was discovered recently in which most of the trees grew ratchet screwdrivers as fruit.
Even
with a tiny epilogue tossed in, which introduces and then discards an entirely
new cosmic parable, Life, The Universe And Everything seems bent on a
mission of offering nothing conclusive or satisfying, except for a lot of
laughs, which can and does count for something.
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