Inspiring Young Readers
The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy by Douglas Adams
If, like me, your first encounter with Douglas Adams’ extraordinary feat of philosophically genre-bending comic imagination was via the original 1978 radio version – or maybe even the later TV adaptation – it’s quite possible that the fact that it was also a series of books may have passed you by at the time. So although I’ve subsequently come to think of The Hitchhiker’s Guide as a book sequence, until now, I’d never read one despite returning to the radio show with some frequency over the years.
The fact is that the HHGTTG has become a familiar cultural touchstone since its first appearance, and its author has become a social guru for the layman and, for scientists, he is often the source of a series of rather nerdy in-jokes. What is undeniable is that Adams’ universe was a unique feat of imagination and produced a kind of science fiction that was irreverent towards the usual rules of that genre but which, in the process of poking gentle humorous fun, didn’t alienate its adherents. It’s a format that has since been endlessly copied to create cultish crossover book/tv hybrids.
The HHGTTG also pulled off the trick of crossing reader age boundaries – you are as likely to see middle-aged office workers reading it as teenagers and, like Monty Python before it, they never seem get tired of quoting chunks of it to and with each other. This is all a homage to the power of Adams’ original and audacious imagination which is richer than we give it credit for now that we are so familiar with it.
But in truth, I suspect that without the superbly realised texture of the radio scripts, this might have been an invention that would have passed us by largely unnoticed had we nothing to draw on but the books. At just about 150 pages, The HHGTTG is a bit of a disappointment – not because the ideas underwhelm or because the fundamentally inspired use of science as comedy doesn’t strike home, but because the writing lacks the depth and texture that the radio plays achieve with a team of writers. Adams most certainly wasn’t a novelist and I suspect he wasn’t really trying to be.
The radio scripts imbued characters like Zaphod Beeblebrox, Trillean, Slartibardfast, Ford Prefect and Marvin, the paranoid Android with a depth of personality that made you care about them in a way that the book never really achieves. The very essence of the radio scripts is sparkling dialogue, so well-conceived that it successfully papers over the really dreadfully thin plot lines – a good many of which bare no substantial scrutiny without disintegrating in front of your eyes. The written novel form is far less forgiving and the wafer-thin plots become so much more noticeable.
I’m conscious that this all sounds terribly negative but actually, leaving aside these weaknesses, this book and the three subsequent ones which make up the whole cycle are in fact huge fun and I defy you not to put yourself in the place of the bewildered everyman, Arthur Dent. Arthur wakes up one day thinking he might lose his home to unfeeling developers intent on driving a road through his house only to discover he is the sole human survivor of the destruction of Earth by those inter-galactic bureaucrats, the Vogons. If you’re having a bad day, it’s hard to imagine it’s going to be worse than Arthur’s.
You wont struggle to find cheapish paperback versions of the book although the hardcover versions are quite a bit harder to find and, inevitably, the first editions are now collectable and command big prices. I would strongly recommend the Folio Society hardcover version in a slipcase – not exactly cheap but, as with most Folio Society books, it’s a lovely production.
Terry Potter
July 2020