The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: The Trilogy of Four by Douglas Adams
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I was thinking of starting my review with a quote from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. It would neatly go to display exactly why the probability of this book’s humour and insight into the ways of the universe actually existing are two to the power of two hundred and twenty-six thousand seven hundred and nine to one against. You see, after coming in contact with the universe that sprung out from the genius that was Douglas Adams, your life gets torn into the period before having read H2G2 and after. It shapes your mind, it makes you think about the world in ways you never thought possible — or it makes you realise that this is exactly the way you used to look at the absurdness of the Universe, only life on this mostly harmless planet has made you think in mostly harmless ways yourself.
It’s such a yummy, well-mixed recipe of dead-pan, random, black, so-funny-because-it’s-so-true humours, all served with hearty amounts of insight you can’t help stuffing your face with the whole pot. There’s also a secret ingredient which talks to your philosophy loving side… It leaves you lighter as you laugh with lines so clever, a writer so talented and situations so bizarre you can hardly believe your eyes. It’s the hash brownie of scifi…
The only breaker for me was the characters as well as the plot. Both of them serve as little more than means to present the jokes. I get the meaning of the story is to be bizarre but at some points it went so overboard I had little idea of what was happening. The characters were also inconsistent and to some point interchangeable. Maybe that was Douglas Adams’s intention? I don’t know. But still, four books later, I have no clear view of the plot or of the characters, they’re blurs more than anything else. Which is a shame, for they were means for some pretty unique situations.
I thought that the first and second book were the best, with the third one having the strongest messages but the most confusing situations and plot. “So Long And Thanks For All The Fish” had its moments, especially between Arthur and Fenchurch but it was generally disappointing. I read however that Adams was forced to push through a deadline for the fourth book and was generally disappointed by the end result himself.
The Trilogy of Four is aptly named for my rating standards: I’m giving it a four overall because it didn’t maintain the stellar quality of the first two books throughout the series. I know I’m not finished. This is only my introduction to this extraordinary and hilarious world of not only The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy but Douglas Adams in general. Now I must play the game, read the rest of the books, see or hear the shows…
And to think I may had not read the books in the end because I hated the film…
