(no subject)

[evening_tsar]

There's no question, Douglas Adams was one of the Great Thinkers of our time. Even so, I can't recommend Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Now don't get me wrong: there's all sorts of lovely Adamsisms throughout, and Gently himself is an inspired creation. But all-in-all, the book is neither as funny nor as profound as The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and is infuriatingly vague at times, most particularly the ending. If I had not already been familiar with "City of Death", it would be completely incoherent, and as is, is still largely incoherent. What on earth did Samuel Taylor Coleridge have to do with anything? Adams himself has said he isn't sure. The internet seems to have settled on an explanation, which, perhaps not surprisingly, most seem to take as evidence of Adams' brilliance, which I do not dispute, but which I do not think is in evidence here. Rather, I think Adams, much like Coleridge, had some brilliant ideas, and simply forgot what they were as he was writing them down. Which brings me to a little bit of blasphemy: while Adams was a brilliant thinker, he was not necessarily a brilliant writer. It is perfectly possible. A brilliant thinker does not need to be a brilliant communicator. A brilliant thinker is too busy thinking brilliant thoughts to share them with peons like you or me. But a brilliant writer is a brilliant communicator by definition. A brilliant writer uses words to communicate brilliant things. If a brilliant writer is too distracted by their own brilliance to write them down on a piece of paper, to effectively communicate them in words, then, however brilliant their thoughts may be, they are not brilliant writers. Dirk Gently hints at all kinds of things, but actually says very little. It's full of subplots that don't go anywhere, nothing is explained, and again, if you have not seen "City of Death", you can't even guess what's going on at the end. Alas, it feels like a great wasted opportunity. Gently could have been a great addition to the canon, one of the great larger than life figures of fiction. But we don't really get to experience him because, unlike Holmes let's say, Adams never allows him to explain anything. Some misguided, deluded folks think this is the halmakr of great literature - that if they can't understand something it must necessarily be great. But I still maintain that Obfuscation is the worse sin than Exposition, and am more inclined to think of Dirk Gently more as a fizzled experiment than a great exercise. (And I've not much hope in the TV series - Samuel Barnett's far too young and pretty to portray the character described here. Have the producers even read the book?)