So Long and Thanks for All the Fish Book Review

Then Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is the fourth novel in The Hitchhiker'due south Guide to the Galaxy serial by Douglas Adams. With everything tied upwards nicely at the end of the 3rd novel – Life, the Universe and Everything – this novel would have to deliver something special to breathe more life into the series.

So Long, and Thank you for All the Fish begins with Arthur Paring returning to 'Earth'. If this is unexpected for the reader, it is likewise a surprise to Dent. It is equally if the sabotage of Earth in The Hitchhiker'southward Guide to the Galaxy never happened. In fact, information technology seems everyone on Earth believes the arrival of the Vogon fleet was some sort of mass hallucination. Arthur is too glad to finally be domicile and eager to resume his former life to worry too much about it.

'Well, in the circumstances I did what whatever red-blooded Englishman would practice. I was compelled,' said Arthur, 'to ignore information technology.'

Even his house is undemolished and as he left it, except that everything is covered in grit, in that location is a lot of unopened post and, strangely, a fish bowl with the message 'So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish' etched on it.

Through a series of gamble encounters, baroque dreams and serendipitous coincidences, Arthur finds himself brought into the orbit of a young woman named Fenchurch. It is as if the Universe is trying to bring them together. It is not merely that they seem to exist fabricated for each other and are rapidly falling in honey; Fenchurch tin can't help but feel that at that place is some college existential purpose to their relationship.

Shortly, this sense of a higher purpose becomes besides potent to ignore. Together they seek out a man who at present calls himself 'Wonko the Sane' who they believe may take the answers they are looking for.

So Long, and Cheers for All the Fish is the 4th Hitchhiker'south novel. I felt after reading the third – Life, the Universe and Everything – that it would require something substantial to resume the series after that third novel had concluded everything then satisfactorily and brilliantly.

Unfortunately, I don't think Then Long, and Cheers for All the Fish achieves that. Of the four novels I have read thus far, it is easily the weakest. The primary fault I have with it is that it ends and so abruptly. Different the earlier novels, So Long, and Cheers for All the Fish read like it was the most considered; it proceeds at a slower step, with large unanswered questions from the kickoff, and things are built and revealed only slowly from there.

If you did not know the length of the volume, three-quarters of the style through you would call up you lot were in the early on stages of reading a much longer and more significant novel than the earlier three. Only it all comes to a conclusion shortly after that. Information technology is like travelling down a g artery only to turn a corner and find it has abruptly turned into a cul-de-sac.

I am non now, nor will I e'er be, a Hitchhiker's geek. Given the mutability of the series and the overlapping, perhaps even inconsistent, variations between different editions, I imagine that to have proficient knowledge in the series would be a task whose difficulty would only make it more appealing to some. I can't say I know why Adams decided to return to the series he ended so well in the third book but, if h2g2.com is to be trusted, he wrote it considering he had been asked to.

… to be honest, I really shouldn't have written [information technology], and I felt that when I was writing it. I did the best I could, but it wasn't, y'all know, actually from the heart.

In addition, if an article at mentalfloss.com is to be trusted, Adams was notorious for failing to meet his deadlines and to terminate the novel he was effectively locked in a hotel suite for 3 weeks which probably goes some fashion to explaining the abrupt ending.

Elsewhere, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish lacks much of the entreatment of the earlier novels; it is mostly Earth-leap and conflicting-less; there is no Zaphod or Trillian and Ford has a small-scale role. But mostly information technology lacks that play on breakthrough mechanical absurdity that makes the earlier novels appealingly geeky.

And that's not to say that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish doesn't accept some strong points. Information technology is however funny. In fact, it has some of the all-time humour of the series and so far. And the early build up, especially Arthur and Fenchurch's budding relationship, only shows what Douglas Adams' writing is capable of when he takes his time.

Next upwardly is Adams' last Hitchhiker's novel – Mostly Harmless. Though after And then Long, and Thanks for All the Fish, it will not exist without some reservations.

For my reviews of the other Hitchhiker's novels, see hither.

mcnamaramagentleed.blogspot.com

Source: https://weneedtotalkaboutbooks.com/2018/03/17/so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-fish-by-douglas-adams-a-review/

Share this post