Review: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to The Galaxy - Douglas Adams

aliens, spaceships and a dash of existentialism

I picked this book up because quite frankly, I was looking for something light and fun to read. Things have become very dire nowadays and I was not in the mood for either the gritty slow burn of The Godfather nor the raw bleakness of Catching Fire, both of which I was in the process of reading.

What I was not expecting however, was to be blown away by the sheer depth of this book.

This book manages to be both surreal and over the top and make you laugh and not take the book too seriously AND be a deep, serious introspection on the human condition.

It is quite rare for a book to pull it off and while there are moments where it falters, it still manages to pull itself up by the next second.

Plot:

So let’s talk about the plot, of which there isn’t much honestly.

While there is a plot to the story and an overarching thread, the story truly seems to matter the least here. That is not a fault though, because I feel like this was by design.

The story follows a human by the name of Arthur Dent, who is quite angry that his house is about to be demolished for a new freeway (i think? I forgot, sorry). But soon, a friend of his called Ford Prefect, who happens to be an alien, by the way, pulls him to a bar to tell him that within the next ten minutes, the whole of earth is about to end.

After this, Arthur Dent gets pulled into some space shenanigans with a cast of characters that

feels both diverse yet also familiar enough for it NOT to feel diverse. It’s all very weird.

As i said, the plot isn’t really there as anything but scenarios in which to put the characters through so that A. Douglas Adams can make a really specific and really weird joke, and B. so that Douglas Adams can astound you with his quite unique observations about the world.

I will say though, that because of how fast everything happens, you never quite feel like things are dragging on. You are never bored because you are constantly thrown from one scenario onto the next.

That’s actually a criticism I have of this Novel but we will get to that soon.

Characters:

When I set out to write this review, I had it in my mind that the Characters are actually where the problem lies. But the more I thought about it, the less it made sense. Sure, there aren’t 100 pages of character introductions with a deep dive of their likes and dislikes but I feel like Adams manages to pull off a feat that few writers can, which is to make your characters memorable in just a few sentences. And he does that.

Each character is distinct and has a very different personality than all the others.

It is quite fascinating how he does that.

There is one character, however, that feels a bit lacking in depth compared to all the rest, and that is Trillian.

She has surprisingly the least amount of depth out of all of them and i find that super weird. Sure, she’s a badass and all but we don’t really get inside her head much unless its about another character.

I am not gonna go much into depth about other characters here because i feel that everyone should experience the story first hand and introducing means introducing elements of the plot that I feel will dilute the experience of a first read.

Writing:

Okay, so in my personal opinion, the biggest strength of this whole book is the writing itself. There were so many cool moments and jokes that would fall flat if they were written by anyone else.

I have never quite read something this unique in so long, and partly it’s the writing itself that pulled me in.

Most times when I was reading the book, I had a pen in my hand with which I would mark out certain passages I found interesting or funny enough. It was hard for me not to mark the entire book.

Thankfully I showed some restraint.

There were actual moments where I had to literally laugh out loud. I don’t do that very often. I normally either just smile or chuckle a bit at funny words or phrases but in this reading, I actually laughed out loud.

Here are some of my favorite lines or sentences from the book:

“Far out in the uncharted backwaters of the unfashionable end of the western spiral arm of the galaxy lies a small unregarded yellow sun.

Orbiting this at a distance of roughly ninety-two million miles is an utterly insignificant little blue-green planet whose ape-descended life forms are so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.”

“And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change…”

These are just the few starting lines, by the way. There are more hilarious lines like this down the line but I figured I should stop before I spoil anything any further!

Themes:

There are quite a lot of themes that are explored in this novel.

One glaring one that I noticed since I am also reading The Myth of Sisyphus at the moment, is that of Absurdism.

There are so many sentences and one liners that feel very much like either existentialism or positive nihilism to me.

The utter indifference of the world to you or your problems is a major theme in this novel that I feel like I should explore further in a future article once I have finished Albert Camus so I can better compare the themes.

There is quite a lot more handled in this book than just that however, from what the meaning of life might be to even, believe it or not, the birth of AI.

Douglas Adams eerily predicted most people’s response to what a fully smart and capable thinking machine would do. It’s all quite interesting that I wish to explore further later down the line for sure.

One shortcoming:

One very big problem I had with this book, despite me loving it, is that it simply does not stop. ever.

What I mean by that is that everything happens so fast and the randomness of the novel feels so jarring that it can be quite overwhelming at times.

Yes, you could perhaps make an argument that given the themes of the book, it makes perfect sense for it to be like that but from a reader’s perspective, i sometimes found myself feeling a bit exhausted from all the random, over the top what-the-fuckness that at one point i legit thought, “okay, this might be a bit overkill here.”

I am all for surreal art and weird shit, but there needs to be some underlying calmness to it all. Otherwise I just start to tune it out and it becomes a bit harder for me to care about either the plot or the character at that point.

That is my one and only criticism of the story so far.

Conclusion and Ratings:

Overall, I think if you like wacky space operas filled with absolute weirdness to the brim that have a surprising amount of depth to the material, I think you will love this.

Despite my one criticism of it, i still give it:

5/5