The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul (1991) - Plot & Excerpts
I've got to admit that, while the Hitchhiker books were fantastic for me as a youngster, they didn't stand up so well and I didn't really have the urge to re-read them. Perhaps it's because I was nearly obsessed upon my initial discovery and immersed myself in the bizarre worlds and antics of the characters so much that I "burned out", or perhaps, and this seems more likely to me, science fiction comedy is ultimately not really my style. Yes, I'm a fairly big SF fan, but I've always felt that unless we're talking about something absolutely timeless, comedy works best when highlighting and satirising the absurdity of everyday, "realistic" people and concerns. This is exactly what Adams does in The Long Dark Tea Time of the Soul, which is undoubtably his most engaging and reletnelsssly funny book from my current perspective.In the first book, Adams didn't focus on Dirk Gently a great deal, and he remained a sort of mysterious and slightly dodgy figure. This story's largely about him, and a great deal is told from his point of view. We learn that he's pretty much a loser, lazy and that the only reason he has clients at all is that all the lunatics seem to be attracted to his pitch. And yet, his "methods" often seem to bare fruit, and while it gives him business, it confounds his sense of reality and place in the world. The beginning of this book is almost a perfect parody of those old private investigator novels...except here Dirk's sleeping late in his dingy flat and missing all the action, showing up in the middle of a police investigation and hilariously having his nose broken by a TV-magnetised, pot-noodle-slurping kid. It just gets crazier from there, and while apart from a few disparate strands seemingly waving around in the breeze there doesn't appear to be a plot for the first two-thirds of the novel, it sure is entertaining to watch Dirk bumble and wander around antagonising people, trying to avoid the hot potato and sleazy lawyers, getting his car smashed up and then coming up with the perfect scheme to get a recalcitrant mechanic to fix it (this was so genius I really wanted to try it myself), and finally through a series of bizarre events meeting the expatriate New Yorker Kate shector, just in time to get the story moving, sort of.Kate's an all right character, too. Adams has made her seem fairly real without plunging into farce, a difficult temptation for him to avoid, I'm sure. Her own exploits are about as entertaining as Dirk's, too. I particularly loved the visit to the psychiatric hospital and the Dustin Hoffman telepath (no, I won't say anymore about that, but hint: this is probably much funnier if you get the audiobook read by Douglas Adams himself). Also, she's lucky enough to have Thor as a houseguest!Yes, Thor! The Norse gods come into this, and they're all bastards and sell-outs, except for Thor, who just wants to go home and to hell with this crappy modern world. I really liked Thor in this book; his bewilderment was endearing beyond belief and Adams did a great job of making him the same grandiose, boastful god of lore and yet imbuing him with a sense of tragedy and loss, while also allowing us to laugh at him.SO yes, it's a light-hearted, glorious romp that still contains a core of intelligence and, of course, high wit. at twelve when i first read the book I really appreciated what Adams had to say about selling out, in particular, and guess what? I still do. Hail Thor!
20,000 ratings, 500 reviews? Why bother to add another one to the masses? You don't need me to tell you to read this book, if you've gotten this far you're either already a fan of Adams or like me you picked it up because of the moody title and should have now found out that it's a sequel to the original Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Fear not, you don't really need to have read the other one to enjoy this additional piece of absurdity from Douglas Adams. Instead I'll make five points about the second Dirk Gently if I may.1. I've read this book more than any other Douglas Adams book.2. This is my good friend Emily's favourite ever book; she loves it so much that she judges people by whether they have it on their bookshelf or not, whether they've even read it and most importantly how much they enjoyed it. Happily I still enjoyed this book, my friendship with Emily is safe.3. The BBC TV series recently aired and was totally and completely brilliant, the performance of Stephen Mangan as Dirk Gently is as close to perfection as you get in a TV adaptation. So good was his performance that I read through this book today and could only imagine him as Dirk, as if Adams wrote it with him in mind (impossible but Dirk doesn't have any problems with impossible, as long as he can find out how it's done.)4. Written in 1987 apparently pizza was not delivered in the UK at this time. The horror! I cannot imagine a world where you can't get pizza delivered. No wonder Pizza Hut was such a big thing when it opened in my town as a child.5. Combining the content of this novel and the fact that he wrote Don't Panic: The Official Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Companion, Neil Gaiman was clearly influenced by Adams when writing American Gods AND for the first time I realised that some of the parts of Good Omens I'd attributed to Terry Pratchett in my mind were obviously examples of early Gaiman.And there you have it, another collection of words written about this book on GR. Well worth reading.
What do You think about The Long Dark Tea-Time Of The Soul (1991)?
"That's it? But... but... there has to be more!" - my reaction when I turned what was sadly the last page of the book. This was followed by a wild turning of pages, flipping it over a few times, tossing it in a corner and staring at it angrily. I had waited patiently, smiled and laughed at the perfect times, even nodded and exclaimed, "Classic Douglas Adams!" when the occasion demanded. In short, I had been the perfect tea-time guest. And I was given no tea! While all the typical humour and wit remains intact (“Nobody got murdered before lunch. But nobody. People weren't up to it. You needed a good lunch to get both the blood-sugar and blood-lust levels up.”), the promise that the first book holds is pretty much reduced to mere flashes. The plot is not as well-knit and leaves you hanging by many threads with either an 'Eh?' or a 'Meh'. The fundamental interconnectedness is also not as interconnected as what one would expect.And oh! Dirk Gently is largely missing as his self-aware, theory-spouting, 'intellectual' avatar. Instead, he's busy playing cacth-up with life, while searching the entirety of London for a single cigarette, and his sole contribution to the entire affair seems to be his guilt-ridden refrigerator. I did consider that it was a rather sad take on how people change with circumstances -- life seemed to have grabbed our man, Cjelli by the collar and shaken all the change from his pockets. But no! I shall have none of that! I'd rather have the old nonchalant Gently, signing off his bills with a badass 'Saving the universe: no charge."That said, it pleasantly surprised me to read some very poignant lines that just for a moment seemingly broke the character-author barrier. I quite believe it was Douglas directly speaking through these lines:“In the past the whales had been able to sing to each other across whole oceans, even from one ocean to another because sound travels such huge distances underwater. But now, again because of the way in which sound travels, there is no part of the ocean that is not constantly jangling with the hubbub of ships’ motors, through which it is now virtually impossible for the whales to hear each other’s songs or messages.So fucking what, is pretty much the way that people tend to view this problem, and understandably so, thought Dirk. After all, who wants to hear a bunch of fat fish, oh all right, mammals, burping at each other?But for a moment Dirk had a sense of infinite loss and sadness that somewhere amongst the frenzy of information noise that daily rattled the lives of men he thought he might have heard a few notes that denoted the movements of gods.”In short, if you're having a cross day, it's more than safe to pick this one up. But if you've already read the first one, it might leave you a wee bit disappointed. Oh well, at least the credentials on the back cover weren't lying...
—Soumya
The back jacked of this book promised me it was "Funnier than Psycho" and "Shorter than War and Peace." Now, I thought that these were jokes. I assumed that that tag was cute and that it would be quite funny. In fact, funnier than Psycho is about as good as the humor was. It was there, but rarely very funny and generally simply kinda cute. It was in fact shorter than War and Peace. I didn't expect much for plot. It is a Douglas Adams book after all, but I had hoped for decent characters. Unfortunately there is so much going on that none of the characters has a real chance to develop. The shifting character perspective didn't help either. The book was quite short, and chapters told from multiple character points of view don't really have enough room to let the characters grow, just paint the bare bones plot. The ending was just bad. Not that what happened was bad, but it seemed that Adams' editors told him he needed to cut 50 pages, and he subsequently decided to cut 50 of the last 55. The action was jammed together, not fleshed out, and a little hard to follow. For as mediocre as the rest of the book was, the ending was a let down. I don't think I'd recommend the book to anyone except the most devoted Adams fan. Unless your reading goal includes being able to say "Yeah, I've read ALL of his books," I don't see any reason why you should pick this up.
—Nathan
I know most people love Douglas Adams for his H2G2 series, and certainly I am one of them, but the (tragically short) Dirk gently series is--at least to me--the much better of the two. Here we see Adams's humor evolving and maturing, moving away from the realm of crude and slapstick humor and solidly into the realm of high-level wordplay. It's still uniquely, bizarrely Adams, with the same profound sense of wacky playfulness and plots more twisted than a coil of rope, but the Gently characters run deeper (and Gently himself is a masterpiece) and the language is sharper, more carefully chosen and masterfully wielded. If you loved H2G2, I cannot recommend the Gently books highly enough. Even if you didn't love H2G2, I cannot recommend the Gently books highly enough.
—Rachel Haimowitz
