“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.
This
week here at Brumbles Publications (if you can call a blog that even), we’re
gonna switch it up! So far, I have reviewed dystopian fiction, young adult, an
autobiography, science fiction, humor, and fantasy. Which, granted, isn’t too diverse, but hey, it’s better than reading the same
genre every week. This week we’re reviewing chick lit!! Hooray! Something light
and fluffy and not hard to concentrate on during finals week! And even better
than that, it’s British chick lit.
