Life, the Universe, and Everything: Still funny, but losing coherence

Life, the Universe, and Everything by Douglas Adams

I loved THE HITCHHIKER’S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY series when I read it back in 5th grade. It was one of the first science fiction series I read, shortly after THE LORD OF THE RINGS and THE CHRONICLES OF PRYDAIN. I was just forming my taste in fantastic fiction, and this was the first series I read that was truly funny, featuring dry, ironic British humor no less. It was completely new to a kid growing up in sunny Hawaii, pretty much as far from rainy, overcast England as you can get. In many cases I knew it was clever dialogue, but had no idea what Adams meant.

Listening to the audiobook read by Martin Freeman more than 20 years later, working with several very British co-workers who love to debate about the Tory & Labor parties, cricket (especially The Ashes), how rubbish Man U is this year, and whether Diego Costa is on form or not, I think I can finally understand what is going on in Life, the Universe, and Everything. After all, a vast chunk of the ostensible plot (a slippery concept where Douglas Adams is concerned) revolves around the white robot army of the planet Krikkit to steal The Ashes from Lord’s Cricket Ground in order to collect the needed components to form the Wikkit Gate and free their planet from the Slo-Mo Envelope. They are armed with incredibly powerful bats that deliver different lethal payloads depending on how they are struck. Seriously, there was no chance that a 5th grader from Hawaii could have understood any of these references, however obvious they would be to a British reader. Even after dozens of attempts by my co-workers to explain the arcane sport of cricket to me, and having seen some matches in New Zealand during last year’s Cricket World Cup, I still have to throw up my hands in defeat. In my opinion, cricket is an even longer, more profoundly dull version of baseball, though its fans are equally fanatic about it.

Since the central plot of Life, the Universe, and Everything revolves around cricket as one gigantic in-joke, if that falls flat, then so does the story. Adams still delivers a steady stream of outlandish, nonsensical twists and turns to keep our favorite characters chasing through time and space to foil a dastardly plot to destroy the universe, and also visit prehistoric Earth to make further comments on how the human race really came about, not to mention some further enlightenment on the question of “What is life, the universe, and everything?” to which the answer from book 1 was, “42.” The humorous one-liners remain clever, and the weird aliens continue to be weird, but the whole formula seems to be running out of narrative steam and revisiting old jokes a bit too much. It’s clear that Adams was getting a bit tired mining the same territory for laughs, and I discovered that the cricket part of the story was adapted from a much earlier story draft called “Dr. Who and the Krikkitmen,” which was rejected by the BBC. So the lack of organic cohesion becomes obvious.

Overall, the humor and comments on the vastness of the universe and the hopelessness of mere humans to understand even a small part of it have been fully covered in the first two books, and we are now retreading familiar ground. Even my favorite character, Marvin the Paranoid Robot, doesn’t have quite as many moments to drown in glorious self-misery. Imagine the funniest Monty Python, Fawlty Towers, or Black Adder episode, and then stretch it into a 3-part mini-series. Not so funny anymore, right? Nonetheless, if you are a fan of the previous two books, and you understand cricket, you will probably still enjoy this. I leave you with a Marvin quote:

My capacity for happiness,“ Marvin added, “you could fit into a matchbox without taking out the matches first.