| Title | : | The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Dirk Gently, #2) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 0671742515 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780671742515 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Mass Market Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 307 |
| Publication | : | First published October 10, 1988 |
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Dirk Gently, #2) Reviews
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“The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks.”
So the title The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Souli s so fantastic! And the randomness, quirkiness and interesting meditations of Douglas Adams's detective, Dirk Gently, matches the tone set by that title. The novel even features the Norse Gods in the modern world (reminding me of Neil Gaiman's American Gods). Definitely a different take on Thor than you'll see in the superhero movies. The mystery/plot(s) are less the point here than simply taking the journey. In that respect, there's a commonality with Adams' more famous Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series. Getting to the restaurant at the end of the universe, for instance, is more important than the destination. For me, the randomness can be too random at times and not at all connected to plot, but again, I know that wasn't the point. I enjoyed! 3.75 stars.
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, 'As pretty as an airport.” -
I had to re-read this because I'm insane but I'm happy to be so because I still loved it.
Total truth time: it's not quite as funny or as sharp in the individual zinger lines as
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, but the long-running story gags are fantastically wicked and cruel and even profoundly sad.
It's also more of an adventure tale for Dirk later on, but primarily, it's all a mystery. Sometimes, the plot is as much of a mystery, too, but I don't care. :) After the rising of new gods in Asgard and the fate of soooo many pebbles, and the dark, dark fate of a Coke machine, who really cares? The novel is brilliant and creative and so darkly funny. It's enough to make me despair for modern literature, and this came out in '88!
Here's another awesome tidbit. It's the novel that I first thought of when I first read
American Gods. All the greatness of seeing Odin on the page or Thor blowing up an airport is all here and the characterizations are brilliant.
Can I even say that it's even more brilliant after knowing the legends much better? You bet I can! I read this when I was 14 years old the first time and let's be frank... I didn't know crap. I learned most of what I knew about Thor from this book and the fact that there was some silly Marvel comic that I wasn't even tempted to read was about it. And now? Soooooo Nice! :) Even the little In-Jokes about the gods are all here. It's a bit more erudite than I expected it to be. :)
But it's also so funny! Do I love eagles even more now? You bet! Am I even more annoyed with Yuppies? You bet! Do I want to run out and get some 300 count sheets and snuggle in them, perhaps get an eyepatch and avoid big strapping men with hammers? You bet!
Poor Dirk. I have to admit that his Horoscope is always dead-on. :)
My one complaint is that there wasn't a whole series made out of this. I still wonder just how amazingly cool it could have been to have a full bookcase full of these and point to it as the most amazing thing EVAH.
*sigh*
Some authors just overflow with goodness. Douglas Adams was one of them. *sigh* -
This is the second book about Dirk Gently, the holistic private investigator. A seriously underestimated series (or what was to become a series, I'm sure).
In this second volume, Dirk is not really at his best. Something is wrong and he can't put his finger to it. To make matters worse, a very well off client, who promised to voluntarily pay for all sorts of quirks, is not just crazy as Dirk had thought, but ends up dead (money sure does seem to have a way of getting away from Dirk). Dirk's horoscope is even worse than usual but instead of taking the holistic approach, he chalks it up to an acquaintance of his being even more annoying than usual (that acquaintance is writing that particular horoscope). Add to that a weird incident at Heathrow airport (it had it coming if you ask me, I hate that place) and several encounters with fridges and a Coca-Cola vending machine and you get the usual silliness for which Douglas Adams was so famous for.
However, as is also signature DA, no matter how silly his characters or observations, they are also spot on. Like how airports are the worst places on Earth and how everyone is aggravated there. Or how the simplest things we're used to can seem paramount when living somewhere this simple thing isn't normal and certainly not simple (yes, I'm talking about the pizza deliveries - Paul, is it true that London doesn't have (or didn't have, in the 80s?) pizza delivering services, but that you have (had?) to pick the pizza up yourself instead?).
Throughout the book there are hilarious moments, classics of the comedy genre. Like when Kate is at Heathrow in the very beginning. Or when . Or how Kate often gets revenge for not having a pizza delivery service in London. In fact, her interaction with in general. Or how Dirk gets his Jaguar from the mechanic (see below). Or how at the very end of the book.
I was once again involuntarily attracting a lot of attention on my commute home when I burst out laughing on several occasions.
Here, for those who already know the book or want to laugh but not read the book (*gasps* shame on you all!):
He did at last understand that the mechanic was also claiming that a family of starlings had at some point in the past made their nest in a sensitive part of the engine's workings and had subsequently perished horribly, taking sensitive parts of the engine with them, and at this point Dirk began to cast about himself desperately for what to do.
He noticed that the mechanic's pick-up truck was standing nearby with its engine still running, and elected to make off with this instead. Being a slightly less slow and cumbersome runner than the mechanic he was able to put this plan into operation with a minimum of difficulty.
He swung out into the lane, drove off into the night and parked three miles down the road. He left the van's lights on, let down its tyres, and hid himself behind a tree. After about ten minutes his Jaguar came hurtling round the corner, passed the van, hauled itself to an abrupt halt and reversed wildly back towards it. The mechanic threw open the door, leapt out and hurried over to reclaim his property, leaving Dirk with the opportunity he needed to leap from behind the tree and reclaim his own.
He spun his wheels pointedly and drove off in a kind of grim triumph, ...
Or this little gem:
An "Act of God". Merely a chance, careless phrase by which people were able to dispose conveniently of awkward phenomena that would admit of no more rational explanation. But it was the chance carelessness of it which particularly appealed to Dirk because words used carelessly, as if they did not matter in any serious way, often allowed otherwise well-guarded truths to seep through.
One thing was scary: the lawyer? The whole time I read the speech he gave Dirk I kept hearing Donald Trump (you know, the pronunciation, the repetition, "the greatest", ...)!
Nevertheless, despite such golden moments of comedy and the fact that were in this, I didn't love this as much as the first book. Maybe it was because Dirk wasn't on top of his game and I kept screaming at him internally that he had already noticed the significant bits, just subconsciously. Or because although there were sharp observations in this as well, they weren't as sharp or as numerous as in the first book. I don't know. However, those are also very strong emotions the book invoked and the writing style was once again top notch and very engaging, the characters all quirky and realistic though (or especially because) extremely whacky.
Before writing this review, I intended to "only" give this 4 stars to mark the difference between this and the previous volume. However, now that I've gathered my thoughts for this review, I think that would be an injustice - the first one was perfection from start to finish, this one was "only" but still excellent after all. Thus, I'm giving it 5 stars yet again, because I'm a solid Douglas Adams fangirl now and it is clear that I love Dirk Gently and am thoroughly saddened by how soon the series has had to come to an end.
I'll definitely finish this up by also reading the "3rd" (actually just a collection of what Douglas Adams had prepared for a third novel plus some other bits and pieces he might have turned into books had he not died much too soon). -
Almost entirely, but not quite, unlike tea–I mean, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. There is no way easy way to say this, but despite ingredients that should be interesting, it just fails to work for me. However, unlike American Gods, which resembles it more than a bit, it is entirely more palatable and has 100% less offensive scenes, so there is that (I may have some trouble with statistics here). Nonetheless, because it is contains some Douglas Adamsisms that have stuck with me through the years, it still had moments of brilliance. Take his airport rule, for instance:
“It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression ‘As pretty as an airport.’
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs.”
This is true. There is nothing about any airport that is pretty. Most people there are indeed tired and cross, which is why when they discover that their plane has been delayed, or cancelled, or erupted in flames, they tend to overreact.
But an airport is just the beginning of roughly three separate plot lines, give or take; a young woman who is thwarted from a vacation to Oslo by a mysterious giant of a man and a fireball blowing up the check-in counter; Dirk Gently, a detective who is hired to protect an unethical producer; and a mysterious old man who would like to lay in bed and be gently catered to by a team of nursing staff. Dirk’s own adventures further degenerate into conflicts with a large eagle and a malevolent refrigerator. It’s all very puzzling mostly due to the narrative breaks and confused protagonists more than any real mystery on the part of the universe.
Having been a fan of Hitchhikers and frequent re-listener to Stephen Fry’s reading, I couldn’t help but see similarities between the lead characters. Dirk comes across like a slightly smarter version of Zaphod and Arthur, a strange mix of lucky and clueless. I don’t know that he ‘solves’ anything so much as stumbles unto the solution. The young woman, Kate, is quite literally, taken for a ride and had some of the general non-descriptiveness feel that I always got from Trillian.
Mostly, Tea-Time contains entertaining interludes and observations loosely connected by plot. To me, it works better in wacky unreal space adventures than in a mystery.
When I was young, I was an enormous fan of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I must have read it ten times. I bought whatever I could then lay my teenage hands on, written by Mr. Adams. But the Dirk Gently series never really gelled with me. Was it a window of interest? I sold off the first, but the title of the second was too, too appropriate to let go. For years I have thought of that saying, that mysterious four o’clock ennui of the soul (both am and pm) and thought that the book deserved a re-read on that alone, as well as notes on a driving technique which I’ve totally used (Note it works much better in rural areas and suburbs).
“Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but then again it was only a short distance, and he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his ‘Zen’ method of navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.” -
Unlike his “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series (a collection of humorous vignettes without much of a plot, continuity, or character development), Douglas Adams’ Dirk Gently series (two novels and some sketches for a third one, included in the “Salmon of Doubt”) is in fact literature of the first degree. In the second novel, “
The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul,” Dirk Gently, a private “holistic” investigator (an eccentric slob, perpetually broke, capricious, silly, and wonderfully insightful), while minding his client’s (Kate, a somewhat confused gal from New York) interests, unravels a pseudo-conspiracy involving the Norse gods (all of them), in which the gods are the victims.
Employing his own special methods (which differ from Sherlock Holmes’ methods in that Dirk has a soft spot for the impossible and does not like to dismiss it), Dirk manages to a) side with the gods b) save them c) punish the guilty d) help his client e) end up broke again. The last bit is fine by him (in the previous novel, he sent a bill to a client of his, whose missing cat he was supposed to find, with just one item on it, “Saving the Universe. No charge”).
Laced with Adams’ trademark humor, this novel certainly puts its author in the same category with Mark Twain, Chekhov, and Maupassant. I’m not exaggerating. -
This used to be one of my favorite books when I was 18 (that was more than a few years ago *cough* thirty something *cough*). I was definitely going through a ‘I love everything Douglas Adams’ phase at the time and while I still like this book because sometimes the ridiculousness of the plot and randomness of how everything happens is still so much fun I didn’t enjoy it as much as I did back then.
There are some great things in this. There is Dirk who is a funny and severely quirky character who is often very creative in his role as a holistic detective. I really do laugh at the odd way in which he sees the world and interacts with it.“He had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his method of “Zen” navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both.”
“When the girl sitting at the next table looked away for a moment, Dirk leaned over and took her coffee. He knew that he was perfectly safe doing this because she would simply not be able to believe that this had happened. He sat sipping at the lukewarm cup and casting his mind back over the day.”
While if I met him in real life I’d probably like to deck him, in the story I find his antics and musings completely fascinating and sometimes hilarious.
Some of the story seemed more like just random events to me this time through and while situationally funny I wasn’t sure how it all moved together sometimes. Thor having performance issues was entertaining as was Kate trying to figure out why right after she left the ticketing gate at Heathrow Airport did it blow un and what is with all the penguins in her subconscious.“Insofar as she recognized at all that she was dreaming, she realized that she must be exploring her subconscious mind. She had heard it said that humans are supposed only to use about a tenth of their brains, and that no one was really clear what the other nine tenths were for, but she had certainly never heard it suggested that they were used for storing penguins.”
Adams wrote some wonderful jokes throughout the story but now that I’ve read so many more books I see where there are some real pacing problems and the actual story is a bit lackluster overall, but the jokes are great.
Even though this isn’t as great as I once remembered it being I still so love to dive into this type of humor from time to time and just give into the improbability and impossibility of it all.
-
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. -
Unfortunately, Adams' sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency isn't as tightly-written as its predecessor. On the sentence level, Adams is still writing furiously funny jokes, but The Long, Dark Tea-Time of the Soul ends up feeling like first-class humor wrapped loosely around second-class plot and characters. Adams has been accused of writing punchlines rather than plots, and it shows in this book perhaps more so than anywhere else. I also thought the book's flow suffered greatly in places, with important scenes not having enough space devoted to their development (especially in the last few pages, such as the Valhalla scene). In addition, Dirk Gently's "fundamental interconnectedness" approach to investigation--where everything is important because it's linked to everything else--is still present here, but the linked items don't line up as neatly as they did in the first book. I also found the conclusion lacking: at the end of Dirk Gently's..., I said "Fantastic!" aloud to the room around me; at the end of The Long, Dark... I turned the page and, when there was nothing else to read, said aloud, "That's it?" So: five stars for humor, but minus two for poor plot and flow.
-
I love Douglas Adams but this book missed the mark a wee bit for me. Although the stuff with the gods was fun I'm not sure how much help Dirk was and the ending was a little abrupt. But otherwise, there were some funny parts.
-
This is very hard for me, you know? I love Douglas Adams; I adore his phrasing, his word structure, and how he manages to make things seem funny,ridiculous, menacing or heartbreaking. I've loved the Hitchhiker books, and he continues to be one of the writers I care for quite immensely.
This is why rating this book as 3/5 is so sad for me, this book started off great, with plenty of intrigue and mystery, and a bunch of characters that seemed interesting and off their rockers (in other words, regular Adams fare). So, I thought I was going to love it, and I did!
But then I came to the last few chapters, and it seems like someone was on Adams's case, asking him to finish the damn book. The whole thing seems hurried, with characters jumping around and events taking place so fast that you couldn't even tell what had happened until you've read it again. His randomness, which is endearing when used carefully, is tossed about everywhere, as he ties up every single loose end in a matter of a few paragraphs.
I won't lie; I felt cheated by the end of this book, and I don't like to be cheated. -
If this title does not speak to you, then perhaps this book is not for you. I loved it.
-
Lots of hilarious moments, though the pacing's not quite up to the level set in the first Dirk Gently book. The ending especially feels rushed - he spends a long time building up this fantastic web of complexity, and then rips it down with a climax and ending that together are barely longer than "But it all worked out okay in the end."
But, as a math student working through too many proofs right now, I really love Dirk's way of thinking! ...especially his reversal of Sherlock-Holmes-style logic:
"What was the Sherlock Holmes principle? 'Once you have discounted the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.' "
"I reject that entirely," said Dirk sharply. "The impossible often has a kind of integrity to it which the merely improbable lacks. How often have you been presented with an apparently rational explanation of something that works in all respects other than one, which is just that it is hopelessly improbable? Your instinct is to say, 'Yes, but he or she simply wouldn't do that.' "
"Well, it happened to me today, in fact," replied Kate.
"Ah, yes," said Dirk, slapping the table and making the glasses jump, "your girl in the wheelchair--a perfect example. The idea that she is somehow receiving yesterday's stock market prices apparently out of thin air is merely impossible, and therefore must be the case, because the idea that she is maintaining an immensely complex and laborious hoax of no benefit to herself is hopelessly improbable. The first idea merely supposes that there is something we don't know about, and God knows there are enough of those. The second, however, runs contrary to something fundamental and human which we do know about. We should therefore be very suspicious of it and all its specious rationality."
Words to live by. Stay open-minded, because there's a lot we don't know about. -
Once again, rather than attempt to describe the latest of holistic detective Dirk Gently's adventures, I will instead present a selection of completely random quotes from the book. They really have nothing to do with each other, but I like them.
"It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression 'As pretty as an airport.'
Airports are ugly. Some are very ugly. Some attain a degree of ugliness that can only be the result of a special effort. This ugliness arises because airports are full of people who are tired, cross, and have just discovered that their luggage has landed in Murmansk (Murmansk airport is the only known exception to this otherwise infallible rule), and architects have on the whole tried to reflect this in their designs."
"Perhaps it would save time if he went back to get his car, but then again it was only a short distance, and he had a tremendous propensity for getting lost when driving. This was largely because of his 'Zen' method of navigation, which was simply to find any car that looked as if it knew where it was going and follow it. The results were more often surprising than successful, but he felt it was worth it for the sake of the few occasions when it was both."
"Confuse your enemy, he thought. It was a little like phoning somebody up, and saying 'Yes? Hello?' in a testy voice when they answered, which was one of Dirk's favorite methods of whiling away long, hot summer afternoons."
Oh, Douglas Adams. Shine on, you crazy diamond. -
The one and only sequel to
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is funnier, at least in the first half, and no less eccentric than its predecessor. A favorite highlight here is the female lead character attempting to explain the concept of "humor" to the director of a psychiatric institute.
Unfortunately in the second half humor is all but forgotten as Adams attempts to satisfactorily tie together all the crazy plot elements - attacking eagles, stubborn vending machines, murderous demons, bumbling Norse gods, etc. - with some measure of coherency, and succeeds only to a degree. -
Adams addiction to mocking the every day mundane and inane just really tickles me. Like, every single time, I'm laughing at simple irreverence. I feel like Adams was the type of man that you really wanted to avoid slightly annoying because you would end up in one of his books, in a section about bistro math, or how no culture has the term "pretty as an airport."
LDTTS is a quick read, its hilarious, its probably the light-hearted thing that you are looking for that you dont even know you want.
Also, Britain, do you seriously not get pizza delivered? I mean, really? What century is this even? -
Adams' bizarre book is more of an adventure than a mystery, and more of a picaresque than an adventure. It's true, this plot wanders and is flimsy at times, but Adams always makes up for it with clever insights and hilarious jokes. Minor events mushroom at the end to unexpected relevance, a very bold literary move that would be a sign of laziness if these moves didn't work and we didn't recognize Adams' competence as a writer from the execution of his humor throughout. Fantasy readers and Adams' fans will have an easier time with some of the leaps in logic (such as what happens to a god when nobody believes in it), and most readers shouldn't expect a hardline plot after the first hundred pages of inaction and wild action. You go along with Adams because of his creativity, exhibited in such things as derogatory horoscopes, depressed deities and a philosophical calculater. His writing style is so absurd that, unless you don't hitch onto the entertainment value and profound ramifications, you ought to appreciate the absurd plotting that works as its product.
-
I have yet to see or hear a coherent explanation why American Gods breaks records, whereas this gem, which even Gaiman himself I think would agree is in quite a higher league, never did make a splash. Just because it's not set in America? That would be pathetic.
-
Sarò subito sincero: se avessi letto questo libro in solitaria, molto probabilmente il voto sarebbe stato un 2 (e quindi grazie Chiara).
Ma la verve e l'assurdo umorismo di Adams ben si prestano a una lettura in compagnia: ci vuole una spalla all'altezza, per apprezzare appieno le tante insensatezze che costellano questo strampalatissimo romanzo.
Sono inoltre ragionevolmente certo che l'incomprensibilità di quasi tutto ciò che è scritto qua dentro può condurre a voli pindarici più o meno costruttivi. Affrontare in due tali cervellotiche elucubrazioni, con buona probabilità concorrerà a limitare l'emicrania derivante dalla lettura. Siete avvisati.
Il talento di Adams nel piazzare scene completamente slegate tra loro senza soluzione di continuità, per poi ricollegare tutti i fili, è sicuramente unico. Purtroppo ho trovato che in questo caso l'autore si sia fatto prendere troppo la mano, lasciando il lettore totalmente spaesato fino alle ultimissime pagine (anzi, anche oltre...). Per riuscire a cogliere tutti i rimandi e le scene apparentemente senza senso, questo libro necessiterebbe probabilmente di ben più di una lettura. Ma questo ha reso la prima un po' troppo ostica, per essere considerata totalmente piacevole.
Io adoro l'umorismo e l'inventiva scatenata di questo scrittore (la Guida Galattica è probabilmente uno dei miei libri preferiti), ma in questo caso (come nei capitoli meno ispirati della saga principale) ho notato notevoli alti e bassi, con capitoli riuscitissimi ed estremamente gradevoli, alternati ad altri decisamente sottotono e forzati, sia come comicità che come lunghezza.
Un punto a favore è segnato grazie ai personaggi: Dirk Gently e compagnia (fino ai personaggi più marginali e secondari) sono caratterizzati in maniera originale e godibile. Dal protagonista fino all'ultima delle "comparse", ognuno è a suo modo memorabile e inserito in scene e dialoghi davvero surreali e spassosi.
In definitiva ho trovato La lunga oscura pausa caffè dell'anima eccessivamente disorganico (per quanto questa mancanza di ordine sia assolutamente voluta e costruita sapientemente) e disomogeneo in quanto a qualità e a divertimento generato. Ciò non toglie che sia stata sicuramente un'esperienza interessante, nella sua completa e totalizzante follia.
Il mio consiglio è questo: se non conoscete Douglas Adams, provate prima di tutto
Guida galattica per gli autostoppisti (Guida galattica per gli autostoppisti, #1) o
Dirk Gently, agenzia investigativa olistica (Dirk Gently #1) . Se apprezzate quelli, potrete trovare qualcosa di positivo anche in questo libro. Altrimenti rivolgetevi altrove: ne va della vostra salute psicofisica! -
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. -
A hot potato, a new fridge - hand delivered from the black market - and a severed head on a record player.
Dirk Gently is on a new assignment, or so it seems.
Is it really possible that a blast in Heathrow T2 is an "Act of God" or is it just a neat and come-in-handy clause in the insurance policy?
Is it true that you can´t get a pack of cigarettes after sunset anywhere in London and St Pancras Station resembles Valhalla?
Have the old Norse Gods sold out, or been caught in a hostile takeover?
And as if these questions are not properly holistic, what about the infamous man with the scythe and all the eagles?
The truth is out there with the Coca Cola vending machine and loads of fresh crispy white bedlinen of the absolutely best quality.
Please have your ticket and passport ready, or you will not be allowed on the plane.
This is for you who want to believe - to everyone else its 300 pages of psychobabble. -
Şahane bir kitap okudum, ŞA-HA-NE!
...
Milenyum Üçlemesinde Stieg Larsson Lisbeth Salander'ın Cebelitarık'ı sevdiğini söyler ve bir kayadan bahseder. Üçlemenin getirdiği her şey için belki sırtını dayayıp dinleyebileceği bir yerdir bu kaya... Adams ile çay saatim bitince istedim ki göklerin tanrısı Thor tıpkı Kate'e yaptığının aynısını yani "bir çiçek demetini kaldırır gibi" beni de kaldırsın ve taaa buralardan tam da bu kayanın dibine bıraksın. Tanrı değil mi yanıma hiç bitmeyen soğuk siyah bira ve belki biraz tuzlu fıstık ile birlikte kitaplarımı da versin. Olsun bu böyle olsun! -
1 Jan 1988
The travails of trying to order a pizza, Valhalla in London, and unexpected encounters with Thor. I loved it.
16 September, 2012
Tash talked me into watching Thor, which I enjoyed enormously. And it reminded me of Adams' Thor, committing an Act of (a) God, when he can't catch a flight to Oslo. More than thirty years later air travel has only become more annoying.It's still fantastically funny, but I'm aware of a sadness to it that I didn't notice on previous readings. The heroine is a widow, the gods are bewildered, homeless and aimless, the yuppies are as annoying as ever. Adams has trouble with plot, so even after reading this at least three times, I'm not exactly clear on what happened at the climax. But with age I seem to have acquired some acceptance: it doesn't bother me that I don't know the details, since the crux is apparent.I wonder what I'll think of it in another thirty years?
27 November, 2016
I'm kind of astounded at what I remembered and what I didn't (the bath, but not the eagle). This time I'm amazed by all the threads connecting it to newer works and authors I enjoy. I don't suppose I'll ever stop imaging what else he might have done if he'd lived longer. -
I'm not sure whether this is the effect of not being jammed into half a train seat by someone twice the size of me, but The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul seemed less funny but more absorbing than the first book. It helped that it included Norse gods, I think. I had no idea that Douglas Adams had tangled with them.
On the other hand, I don't really think that as much seemed to happen, somehow. Less plates seemed to be spinning. I think that was a good thing for the narrative, but it seemed to make the second book different in tone from the first... (And then I wonder if that was just because at no point did I have to stuff my Kindle back into a bag and run to get off a train because I was about to miss getting off at the correct station. I suspect I'm more influenced by the circumstances in which I read books than I realise.)
So... on some levels, I enjoyed this more than the first book, and on some levels, less. Quite an odd feeling.
I do like the nine tenths of the subconscious being given over to penguins. -
This is one of my favorite books of all time. I will re-read or re-listen to it at least once a year and even though I know the story backwards and forwards, it never fails to entertain me.
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As much as I enjoyed ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’, I have to say that ‘The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul’ is the better book. The reason for that is simple – you get more Dirk for your pound! Whereas it was halfway through before this most intriguing of detectives put in an appearance in the first novel, here he arrives in Chapter Three – waging a war with his cleaner as to which of them is actually going to open the fridge door (something which hasn’t been done in over three months) and clean out whatever he or she finds within. It’s a highly amusing vignette, and one which Adams has the genius to turn into a major plot point.
Having now re-read the whole canon, I think I’m qualified to examine Dirk Gently as a detective – and I find he actually has a great deal in common with Sherlock Holmes. (A man with whom he has fundamental differences on the subject of eliminating the impossible). Like Holmes he seems to be asexual, with a love of clutter and a great deal of esoteric information at his fingertips. Indeed he is possibly even more observant than Sherlock, as there are things that Dirk would spot which Sherlock would never give a moment’s credence to. Unfortunately though, there isn’t a John Watson equivalent on the scene to recount episode after episode of this great man’s adventures, but then Gently may be an even more infuriating person to hang around with than his Baker Street colleague.
Indeed this tale opens with Gently’s secretary, having finally abandoned him, working at the check-in at Heathrow Terminal Two. When a passenger can’t board a plane the check-in desk shoots suddenly, and inexplicably, hundreds of feet into the air. From there we encounter angry eagles, mysterious Coke machines, one of the most truly bizarre murders in fiction (which is then, truly bizarrely, labelled a suicide by the police) and the entrance to Valhalla through London’s St Pancras station. Once again Adams’ plotting is not as strong as it could be, and the final quarter does drag somewhat, but it’s brilliantly written and the jokes do keep coming.
It is a real shame that Adams died and we don’t have half a dozen more Gently tales (though given his productivity, that probably would have been unlikely anyway). But at least we have the two, and I promise it won’t be another twenty years before I re-read them again. -
AMAZE-BALLS. Douglas Adams's best work, hands down.
So last year I read all of The Hitchhiker's Guide books and loved them, though by the last one you could tell Adams didn't want to write them anymore. I adored Adams's humor and style, so I was excited to read the two Dirk Gently books. The first book suffered for me a little bit because over the first third of the book was very disconnected. But in this one you can see the connections through the various plotlines early on. In some of Adams's other books, the plot seems to jump around randomly, and while random-ness does abound here, it's much easier to see its greater purpose, and how everything fits together, which is why I found the story itself more engaging.
And then Adams brought in one of my favorite tropes- I knew at that point I was going to love this.
Maybe the mystery itself wasn't as well built as the mystery in the last one, but honestly, I enjoyed the ride a hell of a lot more, the mystery didn't even matter that much. The characters were well-developed, and I liked Kate way more than any of Adams's other female characters. Dirk is still a jerk, of course, but a lot more sympathetic than in the last book, and I loved seeing his methods and the way he approached things.
Honestly the only complaint is that the ending is a bit rushed. In fact I went back a few pages to make sure I hadn't missed anything. Having heard things about how Adams approached deadlines, it makes me wonder if maybe he ran out of time, so just wrapped everything up quicker than originally planned. That or he felt the book was getting too long (it is longer than any of the Hitchhiker books, though on par with the first Dirk Gently). Or maybe he just wanted it to be like that. We'll never know.
Now I'm a million times sadder about him dying so young :( With this book being so original and so fun, I would have loved to see what else he could do, especially since he pretty much told everyone asking for more Hitchhiker's "fuck you" in Mostly Harmless. Douglas Adams's humor and style was such a gift and literature definitely needs more of it. -
I am not going to write a full review of this book.
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Keine 220 Seiten und man muss unglaublich beim Hören aufpassen, was allerdings auch an den nahtlosen Übergängen der vielen Handlungsebenen liegen mag. Vielleicht hätte man das anders machen können aber so schrieb Douglas Adams nun mal. Trotz alledem ist es eine unglaublich unterhaltsame Geschichte voll britischem Humor.
Aber was hatte sie mit Tee zu tun?
Kaffee ja; definitiv viel mit Bettlaken aber Tee? -
I first read this book in the late 1980s and I completely loved it. Even more than Douglas Adams' better known series, The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy.
In some ways it's quite dated. Answering machines, no cell phones, no GPS, smoking in public, record players. But for all of that it still works which is testament to the genius of Douglas Adams. -
Dirk Gently is a "holistic detective" who makes use of "the fundamental interconnectedness of all things" to solve the whole crime, and find the whole person. He bills for everything but claims that he cannot be considered to have ripped anybody off, because none of his clients ever pay him. I can't speak for the first book, since I read out of order, but he certainly doesn't get paid in this one.
I so wanted to give this book five stars. I love Douglas Adams' humor, and his Hitchhiker's series will always be one of my favorites and a go-to. This, however, fell flat after the first half. The set up was pure Adams' British humor. Ridiculousness for ridiculousness' sake, but then when we get to a point where things must be explained it just falls apart.
It seems the Dirk books are about seemingly unconnected narrative threads eventually meeting up and becoming connected, but that didn't happen here. There is an ending of sorts. This was about Thor and Odin, Norse Gods, who have been misplaced and have lost, not only their powers, but also their marbles! Adams attempt to pull the threads together simply caused more confusion for me and the novel felt very unfinished.
I think there are parts of this book that could be read alone as an example of Adams' genius, but the novel, taken as a whole, was not successful. I will still read the first because I am a bit of a completest and it was a mistake on my part to read out of order, but I won't be expecting much.
