So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish – Douglas Adams, 1984 ★★★

Love, Hitchhiker Style

Through the course of three novels, Arthur Dent had it pretty rough. First the Earth blew up. Then the Universe tried to kill him. Misery chased him across every parsec of the galaxy, then dumped him in prehistoric exile with only his towel and bathrobe for company.

So how can one begrudge him a little happiness?

The fourth book in Douglas Adams’s “Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy” trilogy, So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish sidesteps all that backstory for a rom-com where Dent returns to Earth to find it just as he left it, except all the dolphins have mysteriously disappeared:

By his own personal time scale, so far as he could estimate it, living as he had been under the alien rotations of distant suns, it was eight years since he had left, but what time had passed here he could hardly guess. Indeed, what events had passed were beyond his exhausted comprehension because this planet, his home, should not be here.

Then he meets a woman named Fenchurch and discovers love is indeed a wonderful thing.

Knowing Adams, one waits for that other shoe to fall. And waits. This is one time the author keeps it happy, mostly. There are complications, yet nothing on the order of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast from Traal.

Early in the novel, Arthur gets Fenchurch to write her phone number on the back of a lottery ticket, only to lose it when he turns the ticket in to claim a prize. It's not a major complication in their relationship; nothing really is in this gentlest of "Hitchhiker" books.
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Fans of the “Hitchhiker” series will miss running characters of earlier volumes who are either entirely absent here or regulated to token appearances. Earth is the focus. Arthur himself is different from the original model, more relaxed and comfortable with himself. “Only the eyes still said that whatever it was the Universe thought it was doing to him, he would still like it please to stop,” Adams writes.

You still get fragments of the whimsical fantasy which made the first three Hitchhiker books unique. A British truck driver is actually a Rain God, forever chased by clouds who only want “to cherish him and to water him.” Fenchurch carries her own magic secrets. This time, though, the story is more openly sentimental, with Arthur reflecting on the new love of his life and what it has unlocked in him:

He felt on the sudden like a cramped and zoo-born animal who wakes one morning to find the door to his cage hanging quietly open and the savanna stretching gray and pink to the distant rising sun, while all around new sounds are waking.

Does So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish work? Yes, kind of. Arthur is a character who deserves a chance at happiness, and the author has fun cutting against his usual cynicism by giving his protagonist exactly that. For a guy who didn’t believe in fate, Adams invests a lot in coincidence, and this imbues his story with a refreshing positive tone.

A visit by Arthur and Fenchurch to Los Angeles triggers wonder, puzzlement, and reflection: "He gazed out at the Pacific again, as if daring it to rave and gibber at him, but it lay there calmly and played with the sandpipers."
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But reading the prior three novels does nothing to prepare you for what you get here. So Long amounts to a series retcon, kind of welcome for the pleasant way it unfolds but disappointing for what it jettisons.

At some point during the saga, it became clear Adams didn’t have his heart in it. The writing was usually brilliant, funny, and conceptually daring for the way the author used astronomy and physics as backboards for his epic plot twists. But with his third volume, Life, The Universe And Everything, one began to see elaborate storylines about the Ultimate Answer to the Universe and the threat of time travel were not driving his writing. The focus there was riffing about cricket and alien attack.

So instead of a sequel to The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, the second and perhaps most brilliant novel in the series, you got a rewrite of a rejected Doctor Who script. Life, The Universe And Everything is as funny as the series ever got, but it’s also a sidestep.

Except for its main character, Arthur, the classic "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" cast of characters (seen above in the 2005 film) is largely sidestepped in the fourth book of the series. Marvin the Android does show up at the very end, but it's a rather depressing appearance even for him.
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So what to make of a fourth book that takes one character from the series and constructs a new reality around him? Like I said, with all the humor and positivity, it’s hard to carp. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish does have sci-fi elements in its alternate timeline:

Not that Fire Dragons weren’t an essentially peace-loving species, because they were. They adored it to bits, and this wholesale adoring of things to bits was often in itself the problem: one so often hurts the one one loves, especially if one is a Fuolornis Fire Dragon with breath like a rocket booster and teeth like a park fence.

The Earth that was destroyed is now saved, and there is an absorbing mystery to that we sort of get answered. But if you came looking for exotic worlds and strange beings, it’s going to be a long read.

Adams does go back to quoting entries from the universal travel guide that provides the series with its title. Instead of alien planets, we read excerpts from series regular Ford Prefect’s travels across Earth:

Tips for aliens in New York.

          Land anywhere, Central Park, anywhere. No one will care or indeed even notice...

          If your body is really weird, try showing it to people in the streets for money.

Adams was busy with other projects in 1984, too, like a computer game based on the series. The text-only adventure may have done more to raise awareness of the Hitchhiker series than the book, as it pioneered the use of clever, funny gameplay on the personal computer.
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Ford, Arthur’s companion through most of the series, shows up here after featuring in a pointless sidestory about a war-wracked planet. He eventually appears on Earth to meet Arthur with no explanation.

At one or two points in the novel, Adams carps about how readers might wonder after the series’s main female character, Trillian, and Ford’s two-headed buddy Zaphod Beeblebrox. In the other books Zaphod was the president of the entire galaxy trying to unlock the mysteries of his two autonomous brains. But that was then. Trillian and Zaphod are only referenced briefly as a couple now, no details given.

Adams even seems a bit touchy about it:

What, they want to know, about all that stuff off in the wings with Arthur and Trillian, did that ever get anywhere?

To which the answer was, of course, mind your own business.

Arthur Dent's attitude about his adventures in space may mirror that of his creator Douglas Adams: "Eight years of crazed wanderings round the Galaxy now seemed to him not so much like a bad dream as like a film he had videotaped off television and now kept in the back of a cupboard without bothering to watch."
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Everything I have read about Adams during the two years he toiled on his So Long manuscript depicts a not-very-happy man. Not as miserable as at the time of writing his fifth and final series entry Mostly Harmless some years later, but frustrated enough at the chore of writing another “Hitchhiker” book that his editor moved in and all but sat on Adams until he completed a saleable manuscript.

That Adams did. So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish works rather well by investing so much of his usual narrative inventiveness in the Fenchurch romance. They have some wonderful moments together, naked and clothed. Arthur offers up a biscuit story for the ages.

Adams even rhapsodizes with his singular wit on the beauty of his homeland. “Anyone who can go through Hyde Park on a summer’s evening and not feel moved by it is probably going through in an ambulance with the sheet pulled up over his face,” he writes.

I am impressed how Adams showed he could be upbeat while still writing a funny book. It just isn’t quite on the same level as the prior books. Too much of that grand, zany universe he invested three novels spinning out into absurdum infinitum is missing here. What replaces it feels much, much smaller, if a good bit more heartfelt. I remember liking this book most of all the Hitchhiker series the first time I read it. I can see why now, even if I no longer feel the same way.