BOOK REVIEW: 'Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams'


"Director's Cut" of a review in Sunday's Oregonian:




Not only is [The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy] a wholly remarkable book, it is also a highly successful one -- more popular than the Celestial Home Care Omnibus, better-selling than Fifty-Three More Things to Do in Zero Gravity, and more controversial than Oolon Coluphid's trilogy of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes and Who is this God Person, Anyway?

-- From the prologue by Douglas Adams
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"Wish You Were Here" proffers a bit more substance than you'd expect from an "authorized," "official" biography of "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" author Douglas Adams.

It's not dishy mind you, but Nick Webb's bio actually (mostly) skips the hagiography to capture Adams in all his brilliant, self-absorbed glory. Writing with the cooperation of Adams' family, friends and occasional enemies, Webb spends a surprising amount of time on the author's legendary procrastination. Previous Adams profiles have tended to depict this as a charming quirk, quoting his famous remark about deadlines: "I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." But Webb toiled for years on the publishing end of the business, and he lists the contractual and emotional headaches Adams gave editors, family and friends.

The book also digs deep enough to suggest that when Adams wrote his "Increasingly Inaccurately Named Hitchhiker's Trilogy" -- five (yes, five) comic novels about hapless Arthur Dent's travels across the galaxy -- he was, to a degree, writing what he knew.

Webb is also writing what he knew, inasmuch as he was a friend of Adams who enjoyed arguing with the author about scientific theory in fancy restaurants -- the fancy restaurants being an addiction that probably hastened Adams' fatal heart attack at age 49.

Ridiculously tall (6-foot-5) and, as Webb recounts it, blessed with the coordination of a drunk manatee, Adams never quite gelled onstage. A few rough years after graduation, he found himself making inroads as a writer in London -- story-editing episodes of "Doctor Who" and getting knackered with Monty Python's Graham Chapman under the guise of "collaboration." (Adams actually contributed to a late-run episode of "Monty Python's Flying Circus," earning one of its few outside writing credits.)

In 1978, Adams sold the BBC on his six-episode radio series, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy." Legend has it the idea came to Adams as he lay in a field in Austria, drunk, looking at the stars and thinking the "Hitchhiker's Guide to Europe" lacked scope.

The show began with bathrobe-wearing Arthur and his pal Ford hitching a ride in a flying saucer to escape the Earth, which has been demolished to make way for an interstellar bypass. Soon, the nervous Earthman finds himself traveling with the President of the Galaxy, the president's Earthling girlfriend and a clinically depressed robot; tangling with superintelligent mice seeking "The Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life, The Universe and Everything"; and popping into a time-traveling restaurant where yuppies watch the universe end over cocktails.

All of this was interspersed with entries from the Guide -- a spacefarer's travel reference that riffs on everything from alien cultural mores to the importance of a good towel.

For the initiated, it goes without saying that the show was a massive hit -- and sparked a global phenomenon. Over the past two decades, variations on Adams' basic story have been re-told as a stage play, TV miniseries, video game, comic book and the movie that opened Friday. But it's one of the few creative works that's proved most popular in book form -- with over 15 million copies of Adams' five "Hitchhiker" novels sold.

The precise appeal of those novels is tough to sum up in pithy sentences. On one level, they're gut-bustingly funny and inventive. But they're also weirdly perfect mixes of comedy and cosmology -- purees of "Doctor Who" and "Python" written in a wholly original voice.

"Douglas heard the music," writes Webb. "[His] books are witty about big questions." Adams rarely told a well-structured story; at worst, his writing can feel like strung-together collections of clever gags. But at his best, he found new ways to collide the cosmic and the mundane. To wit:

The Guide riffs on the biggest problem created by time travel -- several annoying new grammar tenses.

The English sport of cricket turns out to be an unwitting homage to a bloody intergalactic war.

The search for God leads to a senile old man living in a shack with his cat, unsure if anything exists outside his door.

An alien cursed with eternal life uses his immortality to insult every living being in the universe -- in alphabetical order.

The discipline of sketch-writing left Adams with a knack for strangely perfect turns of phrase. Alien vessels hang improbably in the air "in much the same way bricks don't." In book three, Arthur teaches himself to fly -- by "learning how to throw yourself at the ground and miss." The books are relentlessly quotable, and it was hard-won: Webb notes that Adams was famous for coming to work with a dozen pages of script, writing furiously all day, and leaving with eight.

Webb also charts how Adams' personal life -- his love of restaurants, environmentalism, science, philosophy, and love itself -- played out in his ridiculous book scenarios. In "Life, the Universe and Everything," a spaceship is powered by the uncertainties of restaurant-check mathematics. And the author's obsession with guitar rock led to his creation of the supergroup Disaster Area -- a band so loud, "the best sound balance is usually to be heard from within concrete bunkers some thirty-seven miles from the stage." In the fourth book, mankind is saved from extinction thanks to a "Save the Humans" effort mounted by Earth's second-most-intelligent species, the dolphins. (Humans, in Adams' cosmology, ran a distant third.)

Given his profound lack of discipline, it's a wonder any of this got written at all.

"Douglas was romantic, warm, funny, exuberantly enthusiastic and possessed of a quite exceptional brain," writes Webb. "He also had his demons, and could be depressed, self-absorbed, sulky and difficult."

And late. Very, very late. Webb has the author literally writing and revising radio-show dialogue in the next room during the recording of the final radio-show installments. There's also a first-person account in Webb's book from editor Sonny Mehta, in which he describes literally moving into a hotel room with Adams for three weeks to get him to finish "So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish."

A decade-long bout of writer's block followed "Mostly Harmless." Travel was Adams' chief avoidance mechanism; however, it also produced what is arguably his best work -- a non-fiction travelogue titled "Last Chance to See." Published in 1990, it found Adams and co-author Mark Carwardine tracking down obscure endangered species. Adams also helped launch a failed multimedia venture, The Digital Village, which produced the "Starship Titanic" book and video game as well as h2g2.com, an attempt to create a real "Hitchhiker's Guide" in the form of an online encyclopedia.

Just before he died, his writer's drought had apparently ended. He'd started work on a new book, "The Salmon of Doubt," that was evolving into either a somewhat-cheerier sixth "Hitchhiker" novel or an installment in his other series, which starred "existential detective" Dirk Gently. (A reconstruction of "Salmon" was published posthumously in 2003.)

And just before Adams died, the film version of "Hitchhiker" was moving forward after a decade in development hell -- a process Adams likened to "trying to grill a steak by having a succession of people coming into the room and breathing on it." He did, however, live to see his work intrude on the culture in some perversely funny ways: The computer that bested Kasparov at chess in 1989 was named "Deep Thought," for example, after the computer pondering Adams' Ultimate Question. And Adams' "Babel fish" -- a living universal translator that swam in your ear in "Hitchhiker's Guide" -- is now the name of the Internet's most popular free translation program. As Webb puts it: "Douglas has left a huge and benign footprint on the world."
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The Hitchhiker's Guide to 'Hitchhiker's Guide'

The lowdown on the five books (and one short story) in the 'trilogy'

"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" -- Bathrobe-wearing Arthur Dent hitches a ride off the Earth before it's destroyed. Then things get strange. Featuring bad alien poetry, a man named Slartibartfast who manufactures planets, and The Answer to the Ultimate Question About Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Hint: The answer's pretty useless if you don't know the question.)

"The Restaurant at the End of the Universe" -- In many ways the strongest, funniest book in the series. Dent and the rest of our heroes run afoul of a planet-destroying rock band, diners at the end of time, a spaceship filled with second-class citizens and a man in a shack who just might be God.

"Life, the Universe and Everything" -- Adams turned a discarded "Doctor Who" storyline into his third novel: Arthur returns to space (in a ship powered by the bizarre mathematics of restaurant checks) to fight evil robots playing a deadly game of cricket.

"So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish" -- Arthur lands on a miraculously restored Earth -- and falls in madly in love with a very strange girl. Adams' planet-bound romance left many fans cold, but there are some intriguing bits involving dolphins.

"Mostly Harmless" -- A dark year in which Adams' stepfather died and his accountant embezzled a third of his money informed this nihilistic final entry in the series. A new, nasty version of the Guide carries out a mysterious plan to re-destroy the Earth (in all its pesky multidimensional manifestations). Can a grieving, sandwich-making Arthur Dent foil its plans? Probably not.

"Young Zaphod Plays It Safe" -- A one-joke short story found in omnibus collections: The future President of the Galaxy, working on a salvage ship, stumbles onto the universe's most dangerous weapon -- Ronald Reagan.
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Douglas Adams: mercurial mind
Sidebar: Interstellar guide to, well, everything
(The Oregonian, May 1, 2005)


Posted: Mon - May 2, 2005 at 01:00 PM        

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