Mostly Harmless
by Douglas Adams
by Marc Hirsh
Mostly Harmless
by Douglas Adams
by Marc Hirsh
originally published in the Rice Thresher, January 3, 1993
Every new Douglas Adams book seems to get more and more oblique, and Mostly Harmless, the fifth book in his celebrated Hitchhiker's trilogy, is no exception. With more in common to his Dirk Gently books than The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy, it sticks out like a sore thumb amongst the series of books that it is supposed to update.
Adams' most famous books have their origin in an Austrian field while the author clutched a copy of the Hitch Hiker's Guide To Europe one drunken night. Several years later while working on a BBC radio script about the Earth blowing up, Adams returned to the idea of a similar guide with the entire universe as its domain, and The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy was broadcast in 1978 to a warm reception. The book version met with even greater success, and when Adams followed up in 1980 with The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe, the American public caught on. He ostensibly ended the trilogy two years later with Life, The Universe, And Everything, and then, never one to let things lie, unexpectedly did it again with his 1984 book, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, which received widespread popular and critical accolades. If you choose not to count "Young Zaphod Plays It Safe," a fairly pointless short story available as a part of the More Than Complete collection of the Hitchhiker books, Mostly Harmless is Adams' third attempt to conclude the series.
Various spinoffs have met with varying degrees of success. The books themselves are spinoffs of the radio program, and a television version which combined Hitchhiker's and Restaurant was broadcast in Britain and still pops up periodically on American public television. While a film version remains in a creative limbo after at least eight years, the Infocom computer software company released the highly successful Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy game, which allowed players to put themselves in the bathrobe and pajamas of Arthur Dent, the earthling hero of the trilogy who never got the opportunity to change out of the clothes he was wearing when his planet was destroyed.
Mostly Harmless is totally unreadable without prior knowledge of the entire Hitchhiker's series. This might not come as much of a surprise, as that is usually what is meant by "series," but in this case, it may be crucial to reread the four other books immediately before starting the new one. This may bring up discrepancies in some of the texts, such as the puzzling change from a full Guide listing for the planet Earth in So Long to the same listing being changed back to "Mostly harmless," the original entry in Hitchhiker's. Although this may cause untold grief for many readers, rereading the other nooks is essential, as minor episodes from earlier books, especially Life, take on devastating importance here.
Understanding the science fiction concept of parallel worlds also becomes central. The idea is that there are really millions of universes, all basically alike, but certain events happen in one universe that don't in others. Adding to the confusion lies the premise that all of these universe occupy the same space but vibrate at different frequencies or inhabit different dimensions. Although this is a vague concept, to enjoy Mostly Harmless at all, the reader will have to accept that the Earth on which Arthur lived with his girlfriend Fenchurch in So Long is actually a different Earth from that on which Tricia McMillan lives, which is itself a different Earth from that of Arthur Dent and Trillian, who, on her own Earth, was Tricia McMillan but did things a little differently. If the last sentence seems confusing, perhaps it would be best to skip this book for a while.
As in So Long, several familiar faces are missing, although not necessarily the same ones. Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armed, con-man-turned-President-of-the-Galaxy is gone, as are Marvin the terminally depressed robot and Fenchurch, the love of Arthur's life. Fenchurch's demise is explained in the book. Marvin met his end in So Long and has stayed dead. Zaphod's fate, inexplicably, is nowhere to be found. The best Adams can do is to say that Trillian, his girlfriend, left him, and he leaves it at that.
So three characters are gone, but Adams adds more to keep us on our toes. The most confusing is the aforementioned Tricia McMillan. In Hitchhiker's, Tricia was an earthling who changed her name to Trillian after she left the Earth with Zaphod. When the Earth was destroyed six months later, she ran into Arthur, the man she ditched at a party the night she left with Zaphod and who survived the destruction of his planet with the help of his friend Ford Prefect, who turned out to be an alien hitchhiker and Zaphod's cousin.
In Mostly Harmless, both Tricia and Trillian are present. Trillian hasn't changed from the other books, but Tricia is from a different Earth, one on which Zaphod had left while she went to get her purse. Tricia has become a successful television journalist but has always regretted that night.
Also introduced is Random Dent, Arthur's teenage daughter, who is struggling for a sense of identity because she hasn't met her father until now and because Trillian, her mother, missed Random's formative years while traveling through space and time as a broadcast journalist. Since Random wasn't conceived under normal circumstances, Arthur has no knowledge of a daughter until Trillian puts her in his care. Arthur has no idea how to handle this, which only furthers Random's anxieties. Her fears about the world bring her into contact with a newer, sentient edition of the Guide, which Ford has been fighting. Ford and Arthur have to follow her to keep the new Guide under control.
For his part, Arthur has been searching the galaxy for a planet that will remind him of his long-gone Earth. He finally finds it, and he soon carves out his own niche as the chief sandwich-maker of his village. Meanwhile, Ford has been in conflict with his employers, the new management of the Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. His goal to stop the new Guide leads him to Arthur's village, and the two of them must somehow get back to Earth to find Random and the Guide.
Two new characters have their roots in previous books. While Old Thrashbarg is a village storyteller who comes off as a twin of Slartibartfast from the original Hitchhiker's, Adams doesn't make him very interesting. On the other hand, the void created by Marvin's absence is filled by Colin, a security robot lobotomized by Ford to be ridiculously happy. Colin supplies most of the actual laughs in this books and demonstrates that Adams hasn't lost his sense of humor but just seems to be using it less.
Like Hitchhiker's, Restaurant, and So Long, Mostly Harmless is highly episodic, with a very loose plot structure, but, whereas this was a boon to those books, it works against this one, giving it almost no focus. When it comes to humor, it most resembles So Long. Unlike the first three books, which have humor in the forefront, these two books show a Douglas Adams with a sense of humor that is either much more subtle or almost nonexistent, depending on your point of view. Ever since the first book, Adams' outright lunacy has been slowly vanishing while being systematically replaced by a quieter form of madness. Unfortunately, this subtlety means fewer actual laughs and more thought-provoking witticisms.
Another flaw in Mostly Harmless is that Adams seems to be having trouble abandoning what he did in Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency and The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul, his last two novels. Adams is becoming comfortable with building up his stories to an impossibly abrupt climax and then waiting for his readers to fill in the gaps and figure out what happened. This problem is even addressed in the text on the book jacket. "(Arthur Dent) never even works out what is going on, exactly," it says. "Will you?" While it is doubtful that readers want to be told ever detail of what has happened, Adams may chase away his readers by leaving them with confusion, and while Mostly Harmless is generally enjoyable, it doesn't seem to have much point, and it leaves more questions than it answers.