Book Review

By Mark Flanagan, About.com Guide

If you’re not yet a rabid devotee of Douglas Adams and the The Hithhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series of science fiction novels, yet find your interest piqued by the numerous pop cultural mentions that have been scratching at the corner of your attention over the years, I suggest that you travel immediately to your nearest bookseller, grab a copy of the eponymously titled first installment of the series and proceed to devour it, preferably along with a bag of your favorite snack food and something to wash it down (the snack food, not the book).

Those of you who have already been seduced by Adams’ Monty Pythonesque satire of the human condition, well known for its propensity to leap off the page and tickle its reader until the milk spurts voluminously from one or more orifices, are likely wondering whether, eight years after Douglas Adams’ untimely death at age 49, Eoin Colfer’s new installment to the Hitchhiker’s realm can possible measure up to the work of its progenitor.

Yes and no. Eoin Colfer, while a talented and respected writer (author of the Artemis Fowl YA series) is no Douglas Adams, and there are, of course, legions of Hitchhiker's fans who will say it was misguided for Adams' widow and publisher to allow this venture at all, no matter what author was chosen. That the story of Arthur Dent, Ford Prefect, Trillian Astra, Zaphod Beeblebrox, et. al. ended when Adams published the fifth and final book in the trilogy, Mostly Harmless, in 1992, and if not then, most assuredly when Adams, in 2001, suffered a heart attack and died.

The plot of And Another Thing... is something of a thin storyline built around a claching of the egos and desires of Galactic President, Zaphod Beeblebrox; Irish entrepreneur and planetary developer, Hillman Hunter; Thor, the hammer-wielding Norse god; and a well-known secondary character from previous Hitchhiker's books.

Colfer does an admirable job of approximating Adams' style without making it a parody. He employs the same satirical tone that Adams would in the course of skewering everyone from personal trainers to wealthy land developers to the gods, themselves, as well as the ridiculous plot twists and inventive humor that Hitchhiker’s fans have become accustomed to. And Another Thing... is frequently funny in the way that we've come to love in the five previous books. Here for instance, Colfer describes the aesthetics of Vogon spaceships in classic Adams' style:

"Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, toward beauty. Vogon ships did not nod toward beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley. They spat in the eye of beauty and bludgeoned their way through the notions of aesthetics and aerodynamics. Vogon cruisers did not so much travel through space as defile it and toss it aside."

No, Eoin Colfer doesn't nail it, and no one could expect him to. I would quibble over some of the characterization choices he makes with Ford and Zaphod, and Arthur, having receded so far into himself and his memories, only vaguely appears as a character in this book. I also found the Hitchhiker Guide notes to be, at times, gratuitous and less thoughtful than what I recall from the earlier books. I did however enjoy the suffusion of Norse deities into the space comedy, and it was fun revisiting our friends on the Heart of Gold (minus Marvin, the paranoid android, God rest his soul). So unless you're of the more rabid camp of Hitchhiker's fans determined to cry "foul" at Colfer's tribute, you'll likely enjoy the humor and nostalgia of And Another Thing..., as I did.