The Restaurant at the End of the Universe: Don't Panic. Continue Not Panicking.

“The Story so far:

In the beginning the Universe was created.

This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”

-The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, Douglas Adams

Could there be a more perfect beginning to this book? No, there is not. The opening to the book, perfectly combining humor, satire, history and science (I’m being facetious here) sets the bar pretty high for Douglas Adams’ sequel to the brilliant Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Luckily, he set the bar himself and knows how to vault over it like the literary genius/comedian that he is.

I do not think I can summarize the plot of this book, if the difficulty of wrapping the first book up into a neat little abstract has anything to say about it. The best I can do is give you a short play-by-play of the highlights of the book, so about every other paragraph (and that’s just an average). I think just the best of the best will suffice.

The introduction of Ursa Minor Beta, or “one of the most appalling places in the known Universe,” is just genius. It “is excruciatingly rich, horrifyingly sunny…[and] it can hardly be insignificant that when a recent edition of Playbeing magazine headlined an article with the words ‘When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life,’ the suicide rates there quadrupled overnight.

Not that there are any nights on Ursa Minor Beta.”

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (also known as Milliways), is a pretty hilarious concept, too, but only because your preconceived notions of the context of the word “end” here are shattered. When he writes “end” in the same phrase as “universe,” we all think of physical end, as in location, but Douglas Adams means “end” as in “destruction.” The restaurant is protected by a time bubble that resets itself every meal period so the diners can witness the end of the Universe. As it is a “time location” and not a “location location.” This way, you can come back multiple times.

As usual, Douglas Adams likes to shoot all your ideas about time travel and relativity to hell. Also, he introduces an amazing new tense that tells you how “to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it.” Of course, that means that you must describe the event differently depending on if you’re talking about it in the future, the past, natural time, etc. It is known as the Future Semiconditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past SubjunctiveIntentional. This is to replace the “Future Perfect.” I cannot even describe this tense. It is practically a new language even J. R. R. Tolkien might be a little proud of.

"Legolas! What wioll haven do your elf eyes willan seen?"
"They're willing taken the hobbits to Isengard!"

The existence of a spaceship so black you cannot make out its shape or even tell how close you are to it, let alone distinguish any of the controls in the ship. Because it’s black on the inside, too.

Then there's the almost-paradox of writing the guidebook: “The simplistic style in which [the statistics of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy] are written is partly explained by the fact that the editors, having to meet a publishing deadline, copied the information off the back of a packet of breakfast cereal, hastily embroidering it with a few footnotes in order to avoid prosecution under the incomprehensibly tortuous Galactic Copyright laws. It is interesting to note that a later and wilier editor sent the book backward in time through a temporal warp, and then successfully sued the breakfast cereal company for infringement of the same laws.” Amazing. Simply amazing.

I hesitate to disclose my favorite part of the novel, the end, but truthfully, I don’t think you can really have spoilers in a Douglas Adams book. Each sentence is not so much a an event not to be disclosed to non-readers, but more of another piece of an adventure. A stepping stone, if you will. If each Douglas Adams book were a ladder, each chapter is simply a piece of wood (or metal, depending on the type of ladder you’re imagining) that makes up the ladder. If you remove a splinter or even a rung, the entire ladder will not fall apart, but it does take away from the ladder’s essence.

So when I tell you my favorite part, it does not make the story unreadable. In a way, it’s like the universe itself; the story and the universe are infinite and could continue in any direction indefinitely.

The Restaurant at the End of the Universe ambled along, delighting me with every page, but the best (and funniest) part was the ending. Arthur and Ford end up on this spaceship, Ark B, to find millions of bodies in suspended comas. What kinds of people are they? “‘Hairdressers, tired TV producers, telephone sanitizers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name it.’” Why, you ask? And actually, Ford and Arthur essentially ask it themselves. “‘The idea was that into the first ship, the ‘A’ ship, would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and then in the third, or ‘C’ ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things; and then into the ‘B’ ship–that’s us–would go everyone else, the middlemen.’” As funny as it is, it just keeps getting better. The planet they came from, Golgafrincham, sent Ark B off to “rid themselves of an entire useless third of their population. The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.” Oh, the irony.

Of course, the downside to sending a colony of people such as these off to a new planet is that some things hold precedence over others. For instance, hairdressers electing to create curling tongs instead of developing fire. And in creating the wheel, the marketing department must first decide on a color. And instead of exploring the area, their film producers make a documentary on the indigenous cavemen in the area.

  

"I've always been told hairs before bears. As in protecting yourself from bears. You'd be surprised
 how much perfectly styled tresses can ward off danger."

But the most hilarious of all, and most satirical, is that they develop a fiscal policy. Ford wants to know how they can have money when they don’t make money. As a response to saying it doesn't grow on trees, the management consultant says “‘Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich… But we have also run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate  has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut.’” So, to revalue the leaf, they are going to burn down all the forests. I cannot stress how loudly I laughed at this point.

I think Douglas Adams just sat in his room and decided to make fun of everyone he could think of. And as they say, the pen is mightier than the sword. The worst part is that I can actually see this playing out in similar situation, if to a lesser degree. I am just glad that Adams has commemorated it on paper. And, er, Ebook/tablet screen.

The book ends with Arthur trying to teach the cavemen to play Scrabble with rocks, “‘but they only word they know is grunt and they can’t spell it…. [He’s] probably spelled crzjgrdwldiwdc again, poor bastard. I keep on telling him there’s only one g in crzjgrdwldiwdc.’” Man, on a triple word score, that word would be pure gold.