The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

By Douglas Adams

I have a few reviews coming up this month that have to published on very specific dates, so it was going to be a little quiet around here for a few weeks. But I hate to let too many days go by without some sort of content so I thought it would be a good idea to discuss a couple of novels that I am currently rereading with classes or individual students. These are not new reads, but they are fresh enough in my memory to discuss with clarity and assurance, so let's get to it.

So anyway, I miss Douglas Adams. His death in 2001 is perhaps the only literary death that truly shook me not only due to his age (he was only 49) but because he was my first real literary love affair and the the author of the first book that really, truly made me stagger in awe. More on that later, but first, the story of how The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy very nearly cost me my university education.

Okay, that's a bit of an exaggeration, but it did almost make me fail my first year Western history exam (which would have been a disaster because that was my major). Here's the story:

It was the night before the exam and like any good Canadian university student, I was cracking my textbooks for the first time that semester in an effort to cram as much of the course material into my head in the ten hours (give or take) before the exam. I had the books all laid out on my bed OCD style and was just brewing up a pot of extra strong coffee when a friend from down the hall walked by my open dorm room door and tossed an inconspicuous little paperback onto the top of my neat textbook pile. He tossed it in a manner that suggested that he was discarding a chewing gum wrapper or a banana peel. He didn't even stop to tell me what it was.

At first, I thought it was some sort of exam prank. I'd grab whatever it was off my bed and find it covered in goo, or something equally annoying and time consuming. But when I went over and picked it up it was the oldest, most busted up paperback I'd ever seen. What was left of the cover was hanging on by the merest suggestion of a fiber, the spine was exposed, cracked and separating somewhere in the vicinity of page 86, there was no back cover at all and it looked like it had taken a dip in the bathtub on more than one occasion.

A looker, she was not, but something possessed me to flip to the beginning of chapter one to see why exactly my buddy had discarded this dilapidated old novel into my room.

Eight hours later, I finished The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, admitted to myself that it was my new favorite book and proceeded to shit bricks about my history exam that was less than three hours away (textbooks still unopened).

The story ends well. I ended up doing fine on the exam and continued my studies over the next three years without incident, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree with Honours. But I learned a couple of valuable lessons that night. First, I learned the practical usages for a towel, both physical and psychological. Second, never, ever start a novel when there is something pressing to accomplish. I have a difficult time prioritizing anything over books. And third, never underestimate the power of Douglas Adams.

Since then I've read this novel at least a half dozen times and it never ceases to make me smile. Through the fictional notion of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (A tablet-like guidebook for interstellar travelers), Adams prophesied the advent of the Internet, the e-reader, tablets, smart phones... or at the very least, Wikipedia. The Babel Fish imagined in the novel predated translation software (one program that actually bears the name Babel fish, in fact) and we are probably less than a decade away from very practical translation apps that will be able to instantly translate any language into any other language at conversation speed. Hell, Adams predicted (almost to the exact spelling), Google. And he did it with such ease that it seemed as though he were blindfolded with his hands tied behind his back. With such accuracy one might require three pints of bitter to soften the mental blow of his awesomeness.

On a more serious note, Adams was the first author I ever read that put a fine point on many of the questions I had about religion. I've been an atheist since I can remember. The way gay people say they've always known they were gay, that's me except with atheism. My family wasn't particularly devout, but they were church going people. But as far back as I can remember I found the entire ordeal of church, the rituals the forced (to me, anyway) joy and the stories to be deeply unsettling and, at times, creepy. It was Adams through The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy that made me realize that I wasn't the only one who thought everyone around me was taking crazy pills. I credit Adams for allowing me to be unapologetically atheist. It's made my spiritual life a lot easier to reconcile.

But what I like most about this The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (and to a lesser extent the rest of the trilogy of five) is that unlike so many science fiction writers (I'm looking at you Arthur C. Clarke!) Adams wrote with a scathingly astute sense of humor and irony and he never once, ever took himself or his story seriously. The fact that the reader navigates Adam's world of morose robots, fjord designers and rock star politicians from the perspective of the mildest of mild-mannered Englishmen is as much a bottomless well of comedic potential as it is a source of comfort in a universe populated by drug and alcohol fueled party animals. Adams had enough sense to ground his readers with Arthur Dent when he knew full well that he was going to send us into a universe so supremely bizarre that there was at least someone we could look to in order to ask the questions we are all thinking about. Want to know the science behind the Improbability Drive? Don't worry, Arthur has you covered, and he'll try to bring along a cup or tea as well.

Thirty years after publication (and ten years after the untimely death of Adams himself) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and its sequels remain not only readable but also as relevant as they were in 1979. There are precious few works of science fiction that can compare to the Hitchhiker series. When so many authors were grappling with the moral, existential and ethical questions of androids, space travel, alien contact and cloning, Douglas Adams threw caution to the wind and made the sci-fi universe safe for those of us who would simply rather bypass the difficult questions, buy a Pan-Galactic Gargle Blaster and see where the evening takes us.

Here's to Douglas Adams and the Hitchhiker's series. He made all other sic-fi sound like Vogon poetry by comparison.

Incidentally, I still own that busted up copy of the book. It's one of my prized possessions.

A Spot of Bother

A Spot of Bother

By Mark Haddon

One of the principle reasons that George Carlin remained a relevant comedian well into his later life is that he never once compromised his freedom of speech for the comfort of others. Carlin's brand of social commentary pulled no punches and he was more than willing to spell out the inconsistencies in our system and within ourselves. Although his primary purpose was to entertain an audience, he certainly left his audiences with a lot to think about. A good deal of his celebrity had to do with the ability to make his audience uneasy about the things he said. In the paraphrased words of Louis C.K. , good comedy takes people to dark places and makes them laugh about it. Or, to put it more succinctly, good comics joke about things that people just don't joke about.

Just ask Tig Notaro.

Good comics understand that everything can be funny in the right context, even issues as categorically unfunny as rape, abortion, cancer and death. I tend to agree with Carlin. Comedy is all about delivery and timing. In the right hands, anything can be rendered not comedy. But it's a tricky business, comedy. If the subject matter is handled in any way incorrectly, the crash and burn can be spectacular. Just Michael Richards.

To be sure, comedy in literature isn't at the same level as stand-up comedy. Carlin, Notaro and C.K. have to make an audience laugh with a degree of consistency over a one/two hour period without fail and much of that has to do with pace, timing and delivery of the comedy. Ask an untrained comedian to get up on stage and do a Jerry Seinfeld routine verbatim and I suspect they'd bomb. Writers, I think, garner a little more forgiveness from their audience. That's not to say that writing comedic novels is a breeze. The same pace, timing and delivery inherent in stand-up exist in writing, it's just that readers can choose to put a book down quietly and walk away mid build. They just don't work under the same stressful conditions.

When literary comedy is done right (Shakespeare's comedies, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy) it is virtually impossible to put the book down mid-stream (lest you break the rhythm). In the true Carlin tradition, Mark Haddon hit the comedic nail on the head in 2003 with his novel The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time. It was poignant yet hilarious novel told from the perspective of an 11-year old autistic child. Certainly, in most circumstances, autism isn't anything to joke about. Just ask the parents of autistic children or those that work with them. Yet Haddon handled the subject matter with both tender gravity and brutal levity, finding the perfect balance between what was acceptable and hilarious and what was unacceptable and categorically un-funny.

I have to imagine that when Haddon took the challenge of writing a comedy about a mentally disabled child he did so with the utmost care to walk the razor's edge. Building an empathetic cast of characters helped immensely. The novel was a commercial and critical success and deserving of the accolades it has received. Mark Haddon had written a comedic novel about a subject that people don't joke about. I'm not sure whether George Carlin ever read the book, but I'm going to imagine he would have enjoyed it.

In his latest (as of the writing of this blog-post) novel, A Spot of Bother, Haddon tries to do with dysfunctional families and mental illness what he did with autism. A Spot of Bother is a story of a family that doesnt seem to communicate all that well. George, the father, is very quickly loosing his mind, his wife, Jean has been carrying on an affair with a colleague of her husband for 15 years, Katie is the emotionally unstable daughter who is poised to get married for the second time and Jamie is the emotionally distant homosexual son. The family makes my family seem like a walk in the park by comparison. A bunch of things happen, there's quite a lot of blood, irrational behavior and a few good laughs along the way. But it doesn't work.

While there are moments of awesomeness in this novel (George rationalizing that cutting a growth off his leg with a pair of kitchen scissors, for example), A Spot of Bother doesn't really follow through in the same manner as A Curious Incident did. In fact, it falls way short. I tried to pinpoint the problem and the best I could come up with was that they elements he used in The Curious Incident that made it such a pleasure are absent in A Spot of Bother. And I don't mean to judge Haddon's book based on his previous success. That's not fair. It's just that the comparison sort of works with what I'm trying to convey, and this is a bit more about my point than it is about Haddon's novels. Bear with me.

First, in A Curious Incident, Haddon created a wonderful cast of characters in which the reader could relate. This is not so in A Spot of Bother. The entire Hall family are so entirely unlikeable. It's hard to relate to dysfunction if you can't relate to at least one of the characters involved in said dysfunction. The characters are universally selfish, self-absorbed and rude. One wonders how they were all able to find any success in the working world and life in general with those character traits. The parents, George and Jean, continuously allude to Katie's fiancee as being "inappropriate," but I struggled to understand why. Ray seemed like a legitimately wonderful man with very few character flaws. I couldn't understand why anyone, anywhere would dislike the guy and yet the entire family and a few friends seems to instinctually understand he is perhaps wrong for Katie. I thought she should consider herself lucky. I got the impression that the editors (or Haddon himself, edited out an entire section where we would all understand what was so wrong about Ray.

Which gets me to Ray. His one and only moment of irrationality seems so entirely out of character from  the rest of the book I figured it was tacked on to create a couple dozen extra pages of drama. Actually, a lot of stuff seems to be tacked onto this book then forgotten. The story was full of unresolved holes. Did Katie get fired for taking the day off work? What happened to Graham after his and Katie's talk? What about the guy that went blind? Perhaps these were examples of how self-absorbed the characters are, but I kept waiting for the repercussions of their actions to catch up with them and they never seemed to.

Don't get me wrong, Haddon is a great writer. He is articulate and his style reminds me a lot of Douglas Adams (which is a good thing, obviously). It's just that instead of taking the reader into dark places and make them laugh about them (i.e. mental illness, cancer, fear or death, etc...), Haddon simply takes us to dark places, drops us off, says a few quick words and drives off, leaving the reader to wallow in the pathos left in his wake. There seems to be a half-hearted attempt to make light of the subjects and a sort-of but not-quite attempt to create a comedy of errors as a frame, but it all seemed to fall flat on its face. This wouldn't be all that bad, really, if Haddon was treading on safer ground. But it left me with the distinct impression that he had little to no empathy for those suffering from real mental illness or those coping with a truly dysfunctional family.

Given the fact that he wrote The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time I give him the benefit of the doubt. Some of the dialog is quite astute and there are some really funny scenes interspersed throughout but the novel was hardly chortle-worthy. By way of comparison, it's not Michael Richards embarrassing himself on stage, but it's certainly not Carlin-esque either.

It's just that this novel left me saying: "Meh."