This book, the first Dirk Gently novel by Douglas Adams,* is - and it truly pains me to write this, but I must be sincere - a bit of a mess.** I have actually read it before - in the hazy, distant past of 2007ish; having loved the Hitchhiker's series and hungry for more by the same author - but at the time I found it too dense and impenetrable and just not as funny. And my conclusion now, on having reread at the wise old age of thirteen [assuming that is that that's how long it's been] years older than I presumably was then, is - still that it's too dense, somewhat impenetrable, and just not that funny. It's a very clever book - I have to concede that - but much like the chief character Dirk himself, one gets the sense as a reader that Douglas is revelling in his own cleverness with the construction of the story, and I had to step back away from each chapter several times and then read stuff on the fan wikis just to figure out what the hell was even happening, and that's the kind of reader experience I expect from David Foster Wallace but not Douglas; & while of course there are many excellent bits and funny details and plot elements that are easy enough to follow that you do get the typical sense of engaged excitement one expects from a sci-fi comedy romp novel, these are, in my opinion, lost somewhere in the predominant tidal flows of deliriously elusive holistic mind-manglage that stands in for any semblance of any halfway cognizable plot to the book. That's not to say it's not worth a read - for the sense of humour and deftness of playful linguistic whimsy alone, any fans of the Hitchhiker's Guide will probably find a lot in here to enjoy - but probably not the story, because it's just bloody hard to find one, until it ends, and Dirk congratulates Douglas on having done such a clever job, and you're left scratching your head at what even it was. Maybe I'm just projecting bitterness at my own feelings of inferior readership at not having found it such an easy story to follow as it seems to think it is to read? Or maybe that's the point? Maybe it's not meant to make sense unless you do actually go away and read Coleridge's entire works, with abundant historical-contextual analysis thrown in for good measure, just to really get exactly what happens with Kubla Khan and the Electric Monk and all that - as I do think were holistic detectives to properly exist that's the kind of thing they'd do? I don't know. And if this the point, I missed it for not having done this and the blame is mine. But it just feels like it ends on a bit of a lazy half-arsed note, where you see the shape of the story that's just happened but have no idea where or why it went as it did, and surely one can't be too roundly derided for expecting a novel about a holistic detective agency to be able to disentangle these kinds of things in a way somewhat more satisfyingly explicable to the client - or reader. I feel like I'm taking the biggest most overegged shit on this book and I don't hate it at all - it's a fun read, and a good story, I think. It just gets lost in its own fluff at every corner. Though perhaps this is the point, and if so, I'm slightly less fond of it for its having so.
* The same author as the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series - for which I've done my introductory post on the first instalment, and my totally-excessively-deep dive into the themes/shit on the last.
** Bizarrely, the same can be said of the Netflix series, though where this novel loses itself in its own ridiculously-overconvolutedness, the screen adaptation takes exactly the right liberties with dialing this back - just a notch, but it's enough - effectively liberating the characters and content to do something similar enough to be faithful to the Adamsian spirit while being something entirely new, and through its being somewhat easier to follow than the book actually ends up being riveting science-fiction and thoroughly entertaining... Also the cast is great, with Netflix-Dirk being an extremely likeable figure who speaks with great relevance to the Millennial malaise; and the Elijah Wood character they have instead of Richard has bucketloads more personality. It's very rare that I'll concede TV or film does a book better than a book does but in this case I think it has. Sorry, Douglas...
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