Is it a mystery? A fantasy? A comedy? A spiritual satire? A free-range, deep-dish metaphysical contemplation of time itself?
The most fun readers may have with Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency is making guesses after every chapter as to what it is they are reading, then revising them after a few more pages.
Probably the happiest takeaway from reading this novel is the sneaking sense its author was having fun writing again. Douglas Adams leaves the increasingly dour Galaxy of his recent past behind to bring forth a distinctly different yet still engagingly silly Universe involving a fictitious British university and the ghost of a computer billionaire.
At the center of the story, yet taking his own sweet time in arriving, is one Dirk Gently, who indeed calls himself a holistic detective, the kind of gumshoe who charges his clients for “detecting and triangulating vectors of interconnectedness” and suggests a lost cat fell victim to a collapsed waveform. Or as he puts it:
“Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the answer. I, however, do not like to eliminate the impossible.”
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| When we first meet Dirk Gently, his main line of business is recovering lost cats. He makes an appointment with one client: "Yes, I'm sure Miss Tiddles will appear, as I'm sure will your checkbook." Image from https://stock.adobe.com/search?k=detective+cat |
Before the story gets anywhere, however, there are about 50 pages of preamble to sort through. Magma forms on a seemingly distant planet. An Electric Monk watches a landscape his overcredulous sensors tell him is a sea of endless pink. A woman waits for her date with growing impatience. A faculty party in honor of the poet Coleridge includes lengthy discussion of Greek ferry timetables.
It all connects in the end, somehow, though the attraction for many will be Adams’s talent for random whimsy on fresh display:
In the great debate that has raged for centuries about what, if anything, happens to you after death, be it heaven, hell, purgatory or extinction, one thing has never been in doubt – that you would at least know the answer when you were dead.
Gordon Way was dead, but he simply hadn’t the slightest idea what he was meant to do about it. It wasn’t a situation he had encountered before.
Way is the brother of the woman left waiting for her date, who in turn is the guy who puts Gently on the case of finding who murdered Way.
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| An early adopter of computer technology, Adams fills Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency with then-timely references to such things as MIDI files and "boxes that went bing." For those who remember, the novel is a warm look back at a world that existed long ago. Image from https://www.pcmag.com/news/time-capsule-a-look-back-at-my-familys-love-of-pcs-in-the-80s |
Does it all make sense in the end? Not really. Adams had problems with endings, as well as with beginnings. Both these issues are on display here. But so are his unbridled imagination and ability at turning logic sideways to create amusingly daunting conundrums.
Once the story gets going, and Gently makes his memorable entrance, Holistic Detective Agency becomes an amusing canter in a universe where ghosts have to worry about stumbling over their own murdered corpses and a sofa can wedge itself into a stairway in such a way that defies simple geometry.
Funny enough, I still remember really resenting this novel when it came out. It was Adams’s first novel in three years, and his first ever unrelated to “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy” series, of which I was quite a fan. To be fair, I didn’t enjoy his prior novel that much, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, but I liked even less the idea of him writing what struck me as a half-baked sci-fi Sam Spade parody.
Looking back, I see now an artist recharging his batteries for a fresh start after too long a time grinding his wheels. Underneath the placid romantic humor of So Long And Thanks For All The Fish was an artist crying out for release, from tropes about depressed robots and two-headed galactic leaders with God complexes. His setting most of that book on planet Earth was a clue: He wanted to write about matters closer to home.
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| Chapel Court at St. John's College, Cambridge. Adams attended the college and used his undergraduate memories to create the fictional St. Cedd's College, where horses appear in bathrooms and rooms extend to places far removed from modern understanding. Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_John%27s_College,_Cambridge |
Like So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency has its origins in a Dr. Who project, or more specifically two of them. The more recognizable one, which was left unfinished by Adams, involved a university professor who turns out to be a cosmic Time Lord.
Here we meet Reg, a professor who explains how a predecessor created a comfy sinecure Reg now enjoys:
“He instituted this, er, Chair of Chronology to see if there was any particular reason why one thing happened after another and if there was any way of stopping it. Since the answers to the three questions were, I knew immediately, yes, no, and maybe, I realized I could then take the rest of my career off.”
A case can be made that Gently is actually a supporting player in the book, a memorable one once in place but secondary to Richard MacDuff, a programmer who is fascinated by the role music plays in the construction of the Universe.
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| Samuel Taylor Coleridge visionary poem "Kubla Khan" gets a new origin story in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. The poem is also frequently quoted as the novel develops. Image from https://romantic-poets.bloomyebooks.com/2013/06/kubla-khan-by-samuel-taylor-coleridge.html |
In the form of a fictitious article MacDuff publishes, “Music and Fractal Landscapes,” he explains his belief in “a music that would be as deeply satisfying as any naturally occurring beauty – and our own deepest emotions are, after all, a form of naturally occurring beauty…”
If there is a weakness at the center of this otherwise pleasant and satisfying novel, it is that Adams, normally the most vigorous of skeptics, becomes enchanted by this idea and how it might play out to the point where it takes over the meaning of everything else.
For the most part, though, Adams does a fine job balancing the free-form phantasma of various plot threads with a grounded sense of humor which seems somewhat revived from his prior effort:
It is difficult to be sat on all day, every day, by some other creature, without forming an opinion about them.
On the other hand, it is perfectly possible to sit all day, every day, on top of another creature and not have the slightest thought about them whatsoever.
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| Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett, at right) with companion Todd (Elijah Wood) in a U.S. TV series based on the Adams stories. It followed a British TV series made a few years before. Image from https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4047038/ |
Gently can’t seem to help himself playing little tricks on those who entrust him with jobs, like using his powers of hypnosis to trigger someone to jump into a canal. There is much humor about universities and how disturbingly old and stodgy they are. Coleridge and Bach are even brought into the festivities, as Adams plays with present, past, and future with his characteristic casual aplomb.
Adams did keep going with Gently a little while longer, with its sequel The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul published the following year. According to Wikipedia, Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency was one of Great Britain’s top ten best-sellers in 1987. Since Adams’s death in 2001, Gently has continued to appear on radio and television, although not quite the franchise "Hitchhiker" has been.
The first time I read Holistic Detective Agency, I was, as I said, underwhelmed, but after a slow beginning I found myself quite enjoying this second go-round. The playfulness at the core of the book is its hidden strength, an ability to engage serious themes in a way that harkens back to the sublime silliness of Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, which I believe is Adams’s greatest work.
Dirk isn’t all that,
but it’s a spry, thought-provoking lark which showcases Adams in rare merry
spirits that prove happily contagious.
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