Customer Reviews

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

5 star:		(37)
4 star:		(18)
3 star:		(14)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

After having read Adams's 'Hitchhiker' series, I then wished to read the recently published posthumous compilation of his works, 'The Salmon of Doubt'. Yet after viewing the back of that particular book, I realised that I would benefit from reading his two preceding Dirk Gently novels beforehand. The first, 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency', is hilariously written, with characters that compliment each other perfectly. Dirk Gently himself outranks Sherlock Holmes and Dick Tracy, in every manner but conventionality of methods, and it is his theory of the 'interconnectedness' of all things that gives the entire novel its sharp and refreshing originality. If read over a prolonged period, the ending may prove a little confusing; but if closely followed, the intelligent climax will be appreciated. Read this book, then read the others!

An amazing novel by probably the best science-fiction comedy writer of all time. This review is alas, however, for the Kindle edition, which is riddled with errors brought about by its direct OCR translation to digital format, which evidently never underwent anything as elaborate as a once-over proofread before it was released.

Some of these errors diminished understanding of the text altogether. For example, at a pivotal point during the novel, "a book fell out of the pocket" reads "a hook fell out of the pocket," in this edition. The non sequitur caused a cognitive paradox which tore the fabric of the universe around it, and kept me awake for an hour researching wherefore a hook should fall out of any bloody pocket in this novel in the first place.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is yet another example of the genius that brought us the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. A plot line with as many twists as...something twisty, and as much chaos as the average family household. It's filled with Adams-esque humour, which is subtle enough not to look silly and obvious enough that even *I* get most of the jokes ;o).

Most people see the Dirk Gently novels as secondary to the Hitchhikers series, but in my opinion they approach, and in some places exceed, Hitchhikers. There is something endearing about Dirk Gently, perhaps it's his oddness that most of us can relate to in some way.

If you like slightly insane humour, or any of Adam's other works (which include several Dr. Who scripts as well as the hugely popular Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy), you should definitely read this book!

Obviously the name Douglas Adams is always going to mean 'Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy', but for those who have only got that far, there are even greater delights to be found between the covers of 'Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency'.

Few books can survive multiple readings, but 'Dirk Gently's...' is one of them. The more you read it, the more there is and the more you realise what a genius Adams was.

It's not worth outlining the story or picking illustrations of the writing, suffice to say that this book is quite simply Adams at his brilliant best.

Buy it and read it until it falls apart. Then buy it again. You will NOT be disappointed.

Douglas Adams' take on detective fiction is playful, imaginative, full of whimsy and quantum theory. I sometimes think my sense of humour must be a bit odd or lacking (maybe that's true of most people!) in that half of what I'm told I will find funny leaves me sighing noisily, thinking `but that is so UNFUNNY'. This, however, tickled my funny bone and then some. But then I've always appreciated the fly in humour. Dada and the Theatre Of The Absurd amused me, and the frankly unexpected delights. How often do you expect that a thinking horse, ridden by a malfunctioning robot monk would enter a mysterious time door in a cave in an unpink desert, and that this would result in the horse appearing in a 2nd floor bathroom in Cambridge. Frankly, it's never happened to me, yet, but now I'm living in eager anticipation....

Basic premise (as with a lot of detective stories) is that there has been a murder. All evidence points to our charming hero, Richard. WE know he's not guilty. Enter the rather shady Dirk Gently, ex Cambridge undergraduate, last seen in police custody some years previously, now running an holistic detective agency. Holistic because it is based on the interconnectedness of all things. Which brings us to Quantum Theory. And Schrodinger's cat. Any event in the space-time continuum can connect to any other. Adams can therefore assemble a joyously random collection of people, things and events, and weave them together. The unfolding of randomness, particularly as it is so VERY weird, doesn't leave the reader (well, this reader) sighing noisily yet again going, `oh, come on, TOO MANY coincidences' . In an interconnected world there ARE no coincidences, everything connects . And because his connections are so cleverly daft, its fun to see what gets linked together.

My experience of reading this book was like watching a very very clever juggler at work - one with a great line in witty repartee; part of the enjoyment is not only seeing the skill but wondering IF he will drop something - The horse? The Coleridge? The salt-cellar?

This is, I'm sure, a love or loathe book. If you liked Adams daft, but clever way of perceiving the world in `Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy' you are probably some way to finding that this too will have you smiling, chuckling, chortling and generally pleased you gave yourself up to enjoyment, Dirk Gently style.

And we all owe Samuel Taylor Coleridge more than we could ever repay. Or at least his visitor

A very, very, stripped down dramatisation of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency - it would have been unrecognisable had not Stephen Mangan made such an excellent Dirk - recently showed on the BBC. It prompted me to go out and re-buy a book - the same edition, no less - that I last owned twenty or more years ago.

Now, on this site, I've already found that writing equivocal reviews of cherished books by a celebrated, prematurely dead cult writer - in particular, this one - is a fairly thankless business.

So I don't expect to be popular. Indeed, it calls to mind one of Arthur Dent's wry observations: It feels rather like sitting in a Vogon airlock, waiting to be thrown into deep space, and wishing I'd listened to what my mother told me when I was young.

Well, I didn't, and it's too late now. So, here we go.

In 1987, revolutionarily, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency was desktop-published by Douglas Adams himself, he boasted, on his Apple Macintosh, using MacAuthor publishing software (an unfortunate branding, given the market which has subsequently grown up around the capability the internet has delivered us for self-publishing mediocre books). But reading this one again - which was definitively not vanity published - it not only looks but feels a little that way: not a bad effort by any means, but it lacks a professional, detached judgement, the bearer of which could have put a hand on Adams' shoulder to say "steady on, old boy".

I have very mixed feelings about Douglas Adams. Without a doubt, he owned one of the most agile minds on the planet. He was possessed of a rare wit - one not possessed, for example, by latter day pretenders like Ben Elton or even Stephen Fry. But Adams could be frightfully arch - smug, really (I know, I know: can't we all) - a tendency which grew worse as his reputation extended itself following the runaway success of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. There's a trade-off between Adams' dead-ball wit - truly Beckhamesque at first - and the coherence and structure of his novels - pretty much non-existent in The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, but ever more in evidence as his writing matured.

Alas, one killed the other: the later instalments of the Hitch-Hiker series felt like increasingly desperate attempts to rein in and put some structure round his original story, but they suffered for being increasingly unfunny and forced, stifling what was so good about the premise in the first place.

Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency finds Adams at as happy a compromise as he ever reached between the two. There are some sizzling ideas: believing in things being a chore for which a labour-saving device has been developed; the whole "fundamental interconnectedness of things" and the translation of fractal data into music (actually pretty prescient, too); but so too is there a real linear narrative, characters who develop and a complex and cleverly-wrought plot reveal.

But it still doesn't quite add up to the sum of its parts: there are a good five too many main characters (or, if you take the BBC's line, ten: none of Gordon Way, The Monk, its horse, Reg, St. Cedd's College, the bored little girl, Michael Wenton-Weakes or Adam Ross makes the BBC version!) and the plotting is Byzantine indeed for such a short book. I am still not sure I understand all the implications or interrelations between Coleridge, some aliens, a ghost, a time-travelling electric monk (why electric?) and a computer software magnate. Adams thought this was clever - he even said so, archly, on the back cover of the book (a "thumping good detective-ghost-horror-whodunnit-time-travel-romantic-musical-comedy-epic" - har har). But actually it all feels a bit arbitrary - rather like some blinding ideas thrown together and frantically stitched into a loose framework of a novel.

I preferred the ideas, I think, unencumbered, and for me this is therefore a waystation on the downward trajectory from The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Olly Buxton

When I was at Oxford I was lucky enough to see Douglas Adams come to speak at the union one evening. As he paced back and forth he rambled hilariously on such a wide range of subjects that it was difficult to keep up. The book has a similar style and definitely benefits from a second reading once you know how things fit together (or don't in the case of certain furniture removal problems...) He joked that the thing he loved about deadlines was "the whooshing sound they make as they fly by" and that the reason one of his books had come to a somewhat abrupt ending was because they gave up hassling him and said "Just finish the page you're ON". I couldn't possible say whether he was exaggerating for effect but I do wonder whether he got a bit distracted and left out some of the key facts that would have helped you work out what on earth was going on, but if anything it's a cleverer book for letting you fill in a few of the blanks for yourself.
This is probably a bit controversial but I really enjoyed the recent TV adaptation and hope for more in the same vein - the writers have got a tough act to follow but there are plenty of ideas in these books. I also saw a student production version of the musical (about 15 years ago, don't know if anyone still does it) which was fantastic - they'd somehow managed to pick out enough bits and pieces to form a coherent plot in less than 2 hours, with big dance numbers and most of the jokes left in!

I loved this book at first reading knowing it to be Adams' best yet. Fate made it his best ever. I've read it at least a further six times since, its being one of my three favourite books of all time. Hearing it read by Adams himself just adds the nuances and brings every sentence to life.

Brilliant.

On my wish list but unfortunately unavailable for many years, I got my copy recently from a torrent download site and would be perfectly happy to pay the royalties to whomever owns the copyright.

Phil Last

A good but not great work from a brilliant author. The story is somewhat labyrinthine and cumbersome, but there are also the magical turns-of-phrase and splashes of genius that only Douglas Adams can deliver. One for the converted rather than the great unwashed.

I have to admit to being a little disappointed by this long-awaited audio version of Adams' peerless (unless you count the sequel 'The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul') late 80s sci-fi/fantasy/drama/comedy novel. I have to be honest and say that Harry Enfield was miscast in the title role - his smug tones are not at all how I envisaged the underhand but essentially likeable Dirk - I also found the constant contemporary references that the audio version has added to the original novel ('Asbo'), rather annoying - in the same way that the current incarnation of Doctor Who's Timelord insists on littering his talk with references to 'Teletubbies', 'Eastenders' etc.
These grumbles aside I found the rest of the cast to be perfectly...well, cast - Billy Boyd in particular captures hapless computer programmer 'Richard' precisely as he is whirled along by events far beyond his comprehension. I'm not sure why Dirk's receptionist, Janet, needed to have her (extremely minor) role in the novel fleshed out, as she adds little to the story but this is not a major concern as she can be ignored.
Overall, the package is very impressive; I guess it's never going to be how you imagine it, especially after twenty years or so. Hopefully they'll serialise 'Teatime' - with some minor improvements it could be awesome.