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Archive for November, 2009

There have been many things written about the Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Many of them are scandalous, many more are only libelous, most are simply untrue – although in accordance with Dr Han Streetmentioner’s theory of the quasi-reciprocality of truth this means that they are almost certainly the kind of indisputable facts for denying which a major religion could kill you.

One of those untruths, and here the author undertakes his statement with full awareness of the risk of a multi-dimensional fatwa, is that the book is written by a large number of roving researchers writing in from exotic locations around the galaxy. Literary research suggests it was actually written by just one man working from his bath. Nobody knows why this should be so, or in fact if this means that baths are in fact the basis for a wholly undiscovered form of interdimensional travel, but sales of rubber ducks amongst astrophysicists suggests they are looking into it.

The literary researchers, meanwhile, have found something else to look into: a new series of entries from the guide which appear to have been written by a different man, writing from an entirely different bath. And, in a development which could turn astrophysicists to thoughts temporal, it appears to have taken longer to emerge than it takes for an Algolian suntiger to settle for the night.

Although, of course, most astrophysicists wouldn’t know how long that was. If you can’t fire it round a twenty-seven mile tube without it scratching your face off, they don’t really want to know about it. Any good biologist, however, would tell you that suntigers are frequently kept awake by their own bioluminescence, an affliction that makes them irritable and likely to attack without provocation but generally far too tired to actually kill anything. Not unnaturally this, combined with the use of extracts of suntiger in pan-galactic gargleblasters, has led to a decline in the species in recent years. Conservationists have travelled to Algol to highlight the problem, but since the invariable outcome is that any concerned conservationist will end up being eaten by a suntiger desperate enough to make a real effort, commentators suggest that nature has clearly already found a way to keep the species from extinction. Nobody worries about the possible decline in the numbers of conservationists, since the one species they try very hard to propagate is their own.

Unfortunately, biologists wouldn’t really care about the guide, which brings us – by a path only marginally shorter than a large hadron collider – back to the literary researchers. Since literary research is, like most poorly-paid professions, doing its best to become showbusiness as a means to stay solvent, researchers have responded to the new volume by strapping glamorous assistants into poetry appreciation chairs, priming them them with simile dumpers, metaphor enhancers and some of the less illegal forms of thesaural stimulators and reading them extracts. Most have died immediately – usually of adjectivitis. This has, therefore, been a failure on two counts: firstly in that it consigned literary programmes to poorly paid post-watershed slots – still the only time of day you are permitted to kill people on live television; and secondly in that the only findings from the research have been the review one assistant delivered in her dying breath, which was this: ‘it’s alright, but it goes on a bit.’

And this, although true, was entirely unhelpful. Because, if there’s one thing that strikes the casual observer immediately about And Another Thing it is that it is big, really big. It hasn’t quite achieved the feat of being the first book to be not only good value for your ninji but of comparable size: that distinction is held by The Magrathean Observer’s Book of Planets (Life Size Edition); a book which it is claimed can sit on a shelf with any of its rivals, as long as that shelf is (a) relatively sturdy and (b) on a planet too large to be included in the book. The Mag, as it is affectionately known in the trade, has however suffered poor sales due to the refusal of galactic libraries to stock copies of what they call ‘mere pocket trivia’ – but even in these economically uncertain times it’s bankable stuff. After the mere pamphlet that was Mostly Harmless, And Another Thing is a veritable election campaign of a novel, albeit presumably a campaign for the cheese and wine party.

But what it isn’t is another Adams gem. It couldn’t be, if only because Colfer isn’t Adams. Even with the vast panoply of beliefs in the modern universe, there are none which support the concept of simultaneous reincarnation, or at least none that are taken seriously, and since Adams was clearly extant in Colfer’s lifetime, Colfer cannot be Adams. QED.

Which would be fine if the dissimilarity ended there. The Unganga people of Bastablon, when faced with the accidental death of a popular princess in a freak baking accident, realised that, since most people had never personally met the princess, there was no difficulty in substituting a similar woman they found in a nunnery. The chosen candidate was given a makeover, taught how to wave and speak in an approximation close enough to fool the vast majority of the populace and then thrust into the full glare of the public spotlight – a level of illumination which had the added benefit of masking a distinctive mole on the woman’s left chin. Unfortunately, the Unganga people had failed to remember that the original princess was also noted for a string of illicit affairs. When the former nun failed to appear in flagrante delicto in  a fuzzy, poorly-focused shot in a tabloid for over a year, the scam was uncovered and the perpetrators, far from being thanked for sparing the public grief, were executed for having obviously been involved in the death – forensic evidence being useless after such a span of time.

Colfer’s personal life, like Adams’, is a closed book. Since both are kept in a vault in the British library it is beyond our ability to compare them. Unfortunately, however, his writing is – if not an open book – a book that can be readily opened over a coffee in the bookshop of your choice.

The coffee needs to be strong.

Perhaps his guide entries are, as some have speculated, intended to originate from Ford Prefect; because, far from resembling Adams’ clever, philosophical ramblings springing from the narrative, Colfer’s are tangential, often disruptive, and contain childishly puerile gags many of which, presumably, simply seemed like a good idea at the time. They attempt to hark back to the original canon through references to aliens and planets from Adams’ volumes, but this is done in such a heavy-handed manner and with so little original insight that it comes across as more suggestive of fan-fiction than professional writing. One could criticise his inconsistencies – referring to both of Ford Prefect’s parents doesn’t square with what we know about his sharing five of the same mothers with Zaphod – but it is more the rampant crowbarring in of species as if playing to someone with the I Spy Book of Hitch-hiker’s Aliens and a passive biro that jars.

Not that Adams himself escaped criticism, of course. His fondness for the long sentence, in the literary rather than the judiciary sense – although there is a narrowly-held belief that he advocated long stretches for those who wilfully destroyed rubber plantations – was part of his legend. He was notoriously held to be the only man who could empty an entire set of Scrabble tiles onto a triple word score in a single play – something which might explain the names of some of his aliens. The cast of the Burkiss Way gave their lives in satirical impersonation of his asphyxiating style. Frequently.

But Adams pulled it off. Like his hero, Wodehouse, he understood that a long sentence with several parenthetical clauses could work if you got the rhythm of the thing right. He knew that you could place one word at the end of a sentence and turn its meaning around. He knew how to balance lengthy discursions against short, punchy phrases in a way that made both stand out. And he didn’t, like Colfer and many other modern authors.  Have. The. Problem. Of placing full-stops in arbi. Trary places. Few authors had Adams’ delivery: perhaps only Wodehouse could be regarded as better.

This stylisation of Adams’ prose extended to his dialogue as well, meaning that when the recent film naturalised the language it came across as flat and un-Adamsy. Colfer’s dialogue is un-Adamsy, unfortunately it is also unnatural. In keeping with his own Artemis Fowl novels, the characters lack a depth and realism, leaving you without emotional attachment or even belief. Whereas Adam’s’ dialogue crackled with wit and sarcasm, Colfer’s lacks humor, apart from of the basest kind.

One thing Adams didn’t really do, at least in his earlier books, was plot. Like his friends in Monty Python, he wrote in sketch form. This led to a somewhat discursive narrative – and one which changed between revisions of the story – but it also meant that every scene had a point, which was invariably to make the reader laugh – and because this was Douglas Adams – hopefully to make them think as well. The dish of the day at the Restaurant at the End of the Universe was a satirical look at squaring our much-vaunted enlightenment with our acceptance of our carnivorous animalistic inheritance. Colfer’s suicidal cows take the same basic idea, strip out both the humour and the intellect, then repeat it for enough pages to get the word count up.

And that’s how the whole thing comes across. Despite the weight of the book, there’s no more depth of plot than in one of the original volumes. Trying to identify specific gags or scenes, you find yourself realising that a hundred pages have passed without you having gained an iota of insight into what the point was. Perhaps the pages are soaked in Janx Spirit, perhaps  the words are simply too close to the page. Who knows…

Of course, in the interests of balance it must be admitted that following Adams isn’t easy. Colfer has taken on the Herculean task of following an author so exacting that even Sisyphus would have declined a jobshare. But maybe that’s the point. Maybe, sometimes, we have to accept that mantles are not made to be taken up. One has only to look to Isaac Asimov – an author once denigrated by Douglas Adams as so bad he wouldn’t let him fill in his tax returns – to see what happens when someone plunders a writer’s intellectual estate. Asimov may not have been the skilled linguist that Adams was, but he wrote with a humanity that shone through his language. When sequels to his Foundation novels were written, they lost the heart and ended up coming across as poor clones of William Gibson, obsessed with updating the science at the cost of the character. Updating Hitch-hiker’s was never going to be about updating the science – there have been no developments to obsolete the infinite improbability drive or render happy vertical people transporters obsolete – but even if the objective was to continue the story it should have been given to someone who shared Adams’ passions, who loved language and philosophy, science and silliness, ecology and erudition. Unfortunately, there is probably no such person – at least not in our universe – and we are left with someone who, like a supply god on the seventh day, struggles to keep to the previous standards.  

Human beings are, as many a thinker has observed, creatures of habit. After settling into a way of thinking they cling to it as tenaciously as a frightened koala to a tree. Authors, however, have a particular peculiarity in this regard. A mind geared to the plotting of novels will find, even when not bathed in the cool glow of the monitor, it is inclined to view life as if it had a point. Where the non-writer will take life as it comes, tinting their outlook with rosy optimism or cold pessimism, the writer will look for the story. Inconsequential actions will gain almost superstitious significance, particularly if they can be viewed as details ‘laid in’ for later on in the narrative.

Take my present circumstances, for example. Three years ago I used to run a small shareware business. After a brief halcyon age it was declining, becoming more a cause of irritable bowels than celebration. Then, out of the blue, my wife was made redundant. Whilst we could stagger on one and a bit incomes, we couldn’t cope with less. Reluctantly, I wound down the shareware and looked for work. Within a month I had secured a job and, within a day, my wife also secured a job. What was interesting was that the two jobs, whilst both about thirty miles from home, were within half a mile of each other. Most people would have seen this as convenient, I saw it as part of the narrative.

Fast-forward to the present and the economic downturn means that my wife has again succumbed to redundancy. Academically, I know us to be safe enough. My salary can cover our outgoings, even if it does mean a reduction in frivolous living, but the writer in me is thinking that narratively speaking things have to get worse before they get better.

Because, if you consider it, that’s how it always happens. You watch the latest blockbuster and you’ll see the hero progressively become more battered, every encounter giving him another injury that will miraculously fail to scar him in the sequel. And just when the odds seem to be insurmountable, just when you think the writers have to kill him off to keep their credibility, that’s when he comes through. It’s a classic formula because it sells. After all, if the hero merely sprained his ankle in the opening scene then proceed to soldier on and clear the building of terrorists with no more than the occasional wince it wouldn’t be worth the price of the ticket.

And it’s not just the blockbusters. Can you imagine a film about a man struggling to believe in his own value would sell if the angel came to save him when he just whined to a colleague at the bank? Would you empathise with the well-fed middle class child who won a tour of a chocolate factory? In writing, adversity is a necessary precursor to success. Applying this to real life may not seem particularly rational, but it’s built into the DNA of writers around the world.

Fortunately, in the longer term this lends writers more optimism than most people. Fortunately for everybody, that is, because how many books would be published, how many films made if writers couldn’t cope with years of rejection by believing in the imperative of a happy ending? The same genetics that make us believe life is never so dull as to contain no scenes of mild peril also gives us faith in our winning through in the final chapter. After all, only Terry Gilliam seems to be able to sell films where the hero is, in the end, crushed by the system. And that clearly can’t come from belief when it’s from a man who, after facing disaster after disaster trying to tell the story of Don Juan not only makes a best-selling documentary about the experience but goes back to finish the film a few years later.

In the short term perhaps the best way to cope with difficult times is to let go and become one of the audience. If we don’t worry about the price of the popcorn and stop trying to guess the ending we might just consider that whether scripted or entirely random, life is always original. And if we cling onto that then maybe, just maybe, we can believe the plot is going to turn in our favour before the end of the current scene.