Why everyone should read the brilliant Douglas Adams novel that left fans baffled

Douglas Adams – who died 25 years ago today – had a rare gift for not writing. He excelled at it. He would spend days, weeks, months at his desk, diligently not writing long-overdue books, while his editors despaired. “I love deadlines,” he quipped. “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

The jokes concealed real misery. Adams’ writer’s block came hand-in-hand with bouts of depression so severe it’s a small miracle he published anything at all. Yet, in his 49 years on Earth – a little blue-green planet at the unfashionable end of the solar system – he somehow produced seven novels, including the 15 million-copy-selling Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxyseries.

Adams’ constant struggle with his craft explains the bizarre circumstances in which he wrote the fourth Hitchhiker’s novel, 1984’s So Long and Thanks for All the Fish. A radical departure, it baffled fans and divided critics. The Times called it “a work in which bits and pieces of different sketches orbit around a non-existent plot”, while British Book News complained that it was “not much fun”. After three volumes of fast-paced, pan-galactic picaresque, here was a quiet, wistful love story in which almost nothing happens. Worse still, the place where the nothing happens is Islington.

So Long is a book about depression and happiness, homesickness and homecoming, loneliness and love. It is a deeply personal book, almost a roman à clef inspired by the places of Adams’ life. Re-reading it a quarter of a century on from his death, I am convinced it is his finest novel.

It begins with Arthur Dent – the hapless English everyman – arriving back on Earth, despite the fact the planet was demolished years ago to make way for a “hyper-space bypass”. Now it is inexplicably restored, along with all its oblivious inhabitants, for whom only a few months have passed. To explain Arthur’s haggard look – one of a man who has survived living among terrifying aliens – he simply tells his friends he’s been in California.

Like many of the novel’s jokes, it’s drawn from life, inspired by the author’s annus horribilis. In 1983, Adams had moved to Los Angeles to work on a Hitchhiker’s film that never materialised. It was “a terrible experience,” he said. “I’d hit the first major failure of my career… I felt so disorientated being in Los Angeles, and so keen to be home and just sort of grab hold of things I knew again.” A warped version of LA appears in So Long as “Han Dold City”, a grim alien metropolis of warring police tribes. “I didn’t realise how much I hated LA until I left,” he reflected. Conversely, his love of London illuminates the novel. One passage begins: “The summer sun was sinking through the trees in the park, looking as if – let’s not mince words. Hyde Park is stunning.”

Returning to his London home, a converted stable house in Islington (just like the one where Arthur’s lover lives in the book), Adams divided his time between not working on the film script, not writing the novel, and frantically not writing a long-promised Hitchhiker’s computer game. “He was the world’s greatest procrastinator,” recalled Steve Meretzky, his co-writer for the game (a classic of its kind). “So Long and Thanks for All the Fishwas about a year late and he hadn’t written a word. So his agent sent him away from the distractions of London and forced him to hole up in a country inn, out in the western fringes of England.”

This tactic had worked in the past, but not this time. By the time Adams left his West Country retreat, there was still no novel. A press release from his publishers, Pan, about its supposedly imminent publication was surprisingly candid: “The great test of a promotion person is to devise a promotion for a book about which one knows absolutely zilch… Prayers are held every morning in the editorial department…” One of the few hints Adams had given Pan about the plot was that it would involve an “Ultra-Walrus”. An expensive hardback cover was produced, featuring a shiny lenticular image of a walrus. In the final novel, there is no walrus.

Pan had paid Adams an advance of more than £600,000. With less than a month until the immovable final printing deadline, Pan booked a suite at The Berkeley Hotel (a small bedroom for Adams, a larger one for his editor Sonny Mehta), where their star author was effectively put under house arrest. He was under constant surveillance and only allowed out twice a day for exercise. When not jogging in nearby Hyde Park, Adams spent all day typing, handing over loose sheaves of pages each evening to Mehta. And, in just over a fortnight, he produced something almost, but not quite, entirely unlike his previous novels.

There is a sense of hope here absent from the earlier books, an optimism extending even to technology. In So Long, Arthur Dent buys a computer – an Apple Mac, like Adams’ own – and, astonishingly, it works. In later life, Adams feared he was seen as a “turncoat” for embracing tech after mocking it so mercilessly as a young man. But this novel still contains some of his sharpest gags about “junky little machines”. Of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation’s bestselling gadgets, he writes: “It is very easy to be blinded to the essential uselessness of them by the sense of achievement you get from getting them to work at all. In other words – and this is the rock-solid principle on which the whole of the Corporation’s Galaxy-wide success is founded – their fundamental design flaws are completely hidden by their superficial design flaws.”

So Long is a short book – under 50,000 words – but a leisurely one, too, filled with lush descriptive passages. One character is a glum lorry driver who literally lives under a cloud. Wherever he goes, rain follows; he has categorised hundreds of varieties of drizzle. Adams’s witty descriptions attempt the same: in So Long, the great English trait of talking about the weather reaches its apotheosis. After one downpour, the sky “now wore a damply ruffled air, as if it didn’t know what else it might not do if further provoked”.

In a teasingly heavy-handed use of the pathetic fallacy, at the start of the novel Arthur is cold, drenched, lost, in the dark. Then he meets a woman called Fenchurch (named by the parents who conceived her in the ticket-queue of Fenchurch Street Station) and light returns to his world. After they meet, he is “as stunned as a man might be who, having believed himself to be totally blind for five years, suddenly discovered that he had merely been wearing too large a hat.”

A couple of years before writing So Long, Adams met his future wife, the barrister Jane Belson. He insisted Fenchurch was not inspired by her. I find this impossible to believe. Trillian – the only prominent female character in his previous novels – is flat and unconvincing, “a cipher”, as Adams admitted. But Fenchurch is alive – witty, charming, and gifted some of the book’s best lines. She has only one impediment: a problem with her feet, which never quite touch the ground. Could there be a sillier, lovelier metaphor for idolising your beloved?

In a magical scene, she and Arthur fly together over the moonlit roofs of London, stripping off and embracing in the air, like lovers painted by Chagall. Human flight, Arthur suggests, is “quite easy… if you don’t know how. That’s the important bit. Be not at all sure how you’re doing it.” The same might be said of falling in love.

At one point, the characters meet a melancholy, reclusive man called Wonko the Sane. He has an air of “peaceful deep dejection… But his smile when he turned it on you was quite remarkable. It seemed to be composed of all the worst things that life can do to you, but which, when he briefly reassembled them in that particular order on his face, made you suddenly feel, ‘Oh. Well, that’s all right, then.’” This comforting, delicate book is much like that smile.

[Source: Daily Telegraph]