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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Fully realised comic masterpiece, 20 Sep 2007
Douglas Adams' underated masterpiece leads Dirk Gently from a search for a missing cat to unlocking the secrets of time travel and saving the human race from total extinction.
I thought no-one could write a better comic novel than 'The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy' until I first read this. I've subsequently re-read this novel countless times and it never fails to entertain, I'm still finding references to literature and popular culture that I've previously missed.
That a novel can be re-read despite the reader knowing what is about to happen is a testement to any novel but this one can be re-read with a suspition that something different will happen this time!
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
Thank goodness he called himself Dirk, 14 Aug 2004
Hitch Hiker fans. Weird twisted fiction fans. Fictional literature fans with taste. Buy it one and all!We follow the life of Richard as he gets helped along his way -through the perils of sofa/staircase interactions, swimming in polluted canals for no reason at all and of course being plagued by a ghost - by Reg (his old director of studies) and Dirk Gently (who thankfully changed his name from something utterly unpronouncable that looks like Adams fell asleep on the keyboard! It is typically brilliant and well worth the read, some things you see coming - but then what would be the point of books of this sort if you dont have the pleasure in being right sometimes! But others you dont see coming. I have to admit that I thought the ghost of a Dodo was going to use the main characters to establish its race as the dominant one on earth for a good few pages. Fortunately I was wrong. For all our sakes - ruled by Dodos??? Buy it!
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
Brilliant!, 15 Dec 2003
Absolutely fantastic! Very similar style to Hitchhikers Guide, with Dirk being very similar to Ford. Very imaginative and full of Douglas Adams' witty humour!
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
Ingenious, 13 Aug 2001
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!
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6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
Coleridge is smirking in his grave, 3 Mar 2001
By A Customer
I love this book. It improves on every rereading. There is always something you've missed before. I love the way Douglas Adams never sees the need to explain the joke or labour the point. Yes, it's complicated, convoluted and unless you know a bit about Coleridge can be baffling at the end. Therein lies the fun! Coleridge is probably smirking in his grave.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
The funniest book ever?, 11 Dec 1998
By A Customer
This was the first book by Douglas Adams I read, not having read Hitch-hikers and I am too young to have seen the T.V series, therefore I started to read without any real expectation or withot knowledge of what a Douglas Adams book is about. I really got into it and although the text is a little hard to follow and you wonder what is actually going on some of the time, the stories and the themes are linked eith great intelligence and the repetion of things such as Zen navigation are wonderfully funny. The writing style of Adams: his use of description, allegory and comparison lend itself to reading in such a way that you cannot put the book down and you find yourtself laughing out loud. It is comparable to the hitch-hikers but in my opinion it is considerably better - it is the hitch-hikers but cleverer, more succint, more imaginitive and funnier. I would recomend it to anyone who likes to laugh.
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8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
Douglas Adams' finest work, 4 Jan 2004
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.
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7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
This was always going to be difficult ..., 9 Nov 2007
While H2G2 III-V had it's key characters and central cast for continuity, Dirk (both of them) had to work from the ground up for this outing. And they do. To be honest, I wouldn't have had Harry Enfield (wonderful though he is) at the top of my list, but as it turns out, he does a rather splendid job. And yes, there are a few touches missing - the odd line I was listening out for - but I'm more than happy to be happy with this, and embrace it as part of Adams' Radio 4 canon. Billy Boyd, Andrew Sachs, Olivia Colman and Felicity Montagu are all superb (do bears...), and play against many of the hugely talented and versatile voice actors from the recent Hitchhikers series. Oh, and Jim Carter is perfect as Gilks. I look forward to the next series.
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12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
Douglas Adams’ Who-listic Re-writing Agency, 16 Jan 2006
As a novelist the only time Douglas Adams managed to break free of his Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy universe was with his two Dirk Gently novels, of which this is the first. One’s appreciation of this novel will ultimately depend on whether or not you are familiar with Douglas Adams’ work as a scriptwriter for Doctor Who in the late 70’s. If you are not (though for heavens sake why not?) you can instantly add another star to the rating I have given this book, as this novel is an amusing and intelligent read. As with Hitch-Hikers, Douglas Adams is still firmly in comic science fiction mode, and Dirk himself is a hilarious character, a detective who’s insane methods bizarrely seem to have successful results. The only slight quibble here is that Adams seems to be much better at introducing his many ideas (over a third of the novel is gone in a blizzard of Oxford dons, mathematical music, Electric Monks, and a wandering ghost, before Dirk himself is even introduced) than bringing them to a satisfying conclusion (the ultimate dramatic threat of the extinction of humanity is finally raised and instantly resolved in a couple of pages in a very anti-climactic fashion), but as fractured and bitty as this novel is there is plenty to enjoy.However, while it may all seem fresh and new to some readers, for those familiar with Douglas Adams work on Doctor Who this novel will ultimately turn out to be a rather unsatisfying re-hash of old material. Douglas Adams famously suffered from writer’s block, and looking back one can see that while he initially produced a staggering amount of ideas during the period when he was simultaneously working on Doctor Who and the Hitch-Hiker’s radio series, he then had many rather bare years as a novelist: ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ was a re-write of an old unused Doctor Who story idea, and ‘So Long, and Thanks For All the Fish’ was a virtually plot-less romance novel. ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ itself is a re-write of two of Adams old Doctor Who scripts, ‘Shada’ and ‘City of Death’, and frankly it’s not an improvement on the old material. Inevitably Adams has to do some pretty heavy rewrites to disguise the material, but Dirk himself is such an obvious eccentric Doctor substitute that it becomes increasingly difficult not to visualise Tom Baker in the role when reading the novel. There are still enough asides and new material to make this an interesting read, with the material on the mathematics of music and the tale of a man who suddenly finds himself a ghost being particularly enjoyable, but ultimately this is an inferior re-hash of two superior scripts.
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4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
FIVE STARS (sorry, couldn't think of a witty title!), 2 Jun 2004
First of all I would like to say that I'm not the sort of person who needs everything to make sense to enjoy something (I'm a Doctor Who fan for Christs sake!) so that is something that helps me love this book.
Mr Adams was (and boy do I hate saying was) a master craftsman. He could be intelligent, witty and plain wierd at the same time and still have room for a bit of sentimentality.
I'm pretty confident that if you're reading this then you have enjoyed another of Mr Adams works. In which case I'm sure that you will delight in reading this as it is in the same style as many of his other books. It is fair to compare it to the Hitchhiker series as it is done in much the same vain. In my opinion it is as good as the aforementioned. Yes so the ending doesn't totally fit everyones perspective of great, but it suits me. It's full of lots of ideas that didn't neccessarily works out, but for me that is just as great; trying to work out what Mr Adams had as alternate plots. Even though the title charactor doesn't turn up till a good half way in, his soon to be friend, Richard Macduff does a good enough job of entertaining us. One to one, I strongly reccomend this to any other Adams fan, and for that matter any other fan of literature. It is truely great, as is its sequal.
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