The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul – Douglas Adams, 1988 ★½

The Gods Must be Crazy

Can a hit record prove the key to solving a mysterious beheading? Will a horoscope’s dire prediction prove for once to be correct? Will a refrigerator’s possibly sinister secret force Dirk Gently to make an overdue renovation in his ultra-messy apartment?

After some 240 pages, I’m not sure I can answer any of those question, nor care very much either way. The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul manages to be rather long, very dark, and wholly frustrating finale to the Dirk Gently mysteries.

I don’t know where to begin. Let’s start with the gods.

In this sequel to Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency, there are several gods, most of whom we meet at a homeless shelter in the second half. At their head is Odin, who it turns out really like fine bedding, and his son Thor, who has temper issues and whom his father views as an embarrassment:

He had always been provided with such wonderful things to get angry about – immense acts of provocation or betrayal, people hiding the Atlantic ocean in his helmet, dropping continents on him or getting drunk and pretending to be trees. Stuff you could really work up a rage about and hit things. In short he felt good about being a Thunder God. Now suddenly it was headaches, nervous tension, nameless anxieties and guilt. These were new experiences for a god, and not pleasant ones.

Times are tough for Thor. Instead of enchanted goats to carry him anywhere he wants to go, he requires an airplane ticket to journey to Oslo in The Long, Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul. When he learns he also needs a passport, it proves too much for this Nordic deity to bear.
Image from https://thewarriorlodge.com/blogs/news/thorfacts?srsltid=AfmBOopMBQzlbAt1oe3RXTHm00GdFYpxJ7Wp872zycm3cz8p-1ZSpeIM

Having a chance to read Douglas Adams as he spins such imaginative prose over and over in the course of this book is not easy to complain about. He is funny, and beyond that quite engaging at making the reader spend long amounts of time contemplating wondrous absurdities about everything.

What makes The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul a chore is that this time he has only a sliver in the way of a plot, and even less of an idea how to distract you from that fact than he did with his first Gently novel, which also started slow but did build into something involving as well as amusing as it went on. This time the plotline is more like the shell of a nautilus, burrowing deeper into itself the farther you go.

Adams uses his characteristic digressions – what were in his Hitchhiker novels amusing side-stories spun out by a vast encyclopedia about all things in the universe – into pedantic, dead-end discursions about how annoying airports are, or what percentage of murderers eat prawn biryanis for lunch.

An ardent nature enthusiast, Adams inserts a mini-essay about how whales communicate across vast distances underwater: "But now...there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships' motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other's songs and messages."
Image from https://www.fisheries.noaa.gov/feature-story/whales-world-sound

You realize after not very long that there is no plot, just random encounters spun out over the course of a couple dozen chapters with minimal effort made in connecting them. The challenge for the reader is not so much making sense of it, but making peace with it.

One disappointment for me with this novel is, despite it being a sequel, hardly anyone is back from the first novel. Dirk’s former receptionist has been transformed for the moment into a Coca-Cola machine, but that is pretty much it. Richard MacDuff, who was more of a protagonist in the first book than Gently himself, is gone and unmentioned.

Dirk himself is entirely changed from the first book, where he was clever and industrious in the way he sold his psionic codswallop as real. There were moments where you sensed he was tuned into some deeper channel of the universe and just coasting on his cosmic insight.

Here, Dirk is just a lazy slob without a clue, basically stumbling his way through the thin tracings of a plot. He is pretty frank about it, too:

“My own strategy is to find a car, or the nearest equivalent, which looks as if it knows where it’s going and follow it. I rarely end up where I was intending to go, but often I end up somewhere that I needed to be.”

Among the indignities Gently suffers through is being repeatedly attacked by a mysterious eagle. "Dirk howled with pain and lurched backwards, not getting very far because he still had a talon hooked to his hand."
Image from https://www.reddit.com/r/natureismetal/comments/bmq1w9/fullygrown_golden_eagle_attacking_a_wildlife/

The intervention of the gods is where the book almost takes off, once they come on the scene. It starts when a check-in desk at Heathrow Airport explodes, a matter which takes much time to resolve but is revealed many chapters later to be the work of an impatient Thor.

Of all the characters in the novel, Thor seemed to have the strongest chance of becoming interesting. Unfortunately, like other characters in the novel, he is more plot-motivated than self-motivated. Adams needs him to do wacky things to get the story moving, and he does them. Or just as often not. It’s a frustrating book like that.

Non-sequiturs abound, as they often do in Adams’s fiction, but here he often leaves them flapping in the breeze. “Toe Rag reacted like an iguana to whom someone had just complained about the wine.” Or “It was a little like phoning somebody up, and saying ‘Yes? Hello?’ in a testy voice when they answered, which was one of Dirk’s favourite methods of whiling away long, hot summer afternoons.”

Stephen Mangan played Dirk Gently in the first of two separate TV series made about the character, made four years apart. Neither series took off. Adams is said to have thought Gently had more possibilities as a television character than Arthur Dent, the protagonist of his "Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" series.
Image from https://mubi.com/en/us/films/dirk-gently 

Adams’s opening words, after the dedication, are revealing. He lists the word processor, printer, and software used in drafting his manuscript. This was a fairly new thing for writers, allowing them to redo chunks of manuscript wholesale. For Adams, a famous dawdler, this must have been manna indeed. But too much swapping out of prose for something that strikes you as more clever at a particular, isolated moment can leave you with a shapeless mess, which is what you get here:

When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping at the lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.

The girl, Sally Mills, figures briefly in the story but like so much else doesn’t factor in any important way. So does a boy who punches Dirk’s nose for blocking his view of a TV and is never seen again. A lawyer and his marketing-executive wife, revealed to have the biggest roles in the mystery, only make the briefest of appearances.

You really just have the gods to sink your teeth into for anything interesting. As Adams describes them, they are lost in their insignificance, created and then forgotten by the humans who once worshipped them, now just getting by on scraps from begging and commercial endorsements.

“Immortals are what you wanted,” said Thor in a low, quiet voice. “Immortals are what you got. It is a little hard on us. You wanted us to be for ever so we are for ever. Then you forget about us. But still we are for ever. Now at last, many are dead, many dying,” he then added in a quiet voice, “but it takes a special effort.”

London's St. Pancras Railway Station becomes transformed into Valhalla's new feasting hall near the climax of Long, Dark Tea-Time. All the remaining gods turn up for Odin's parties, but only Thor cares: "Everybody else just turns up for the pigs."
Image from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Pancras_railway_station 

A train station is converted into Valhalla for an extended fantasy interlude which is more wondrous than amusing, but enough of both. Funny moments flicker throughout the book, brief vignettes like an astrologist who writes insulting horoscope entries to wind up Dirk or man who is discovered channeling Dustin Hoffman. A psychiatrist explains: “It was a very trying time for his family, as you can imagine, living with such a perfectionist actor and not even realizing it.”

The story itself never gets moving for the longest time; once it does everything happens all at once, with nothing really resolved. The Gently concept seemed to center on reworking the classic mystery formula; here there’s even a timid stab at an Agatha Christie locked-room puzzle.

But mystery novels require scrupulous planning; here Adams seems to wing it, backfilling narrative holes with his trusty Apple word processor. However clever he was, it wasn’t enough to stick the landing.