So, after many years of putting it off, I finally got around to reading a conclusion to the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, And Another Thing, by Eoin Colfer. The sixth part to the trilogy, it did, at times, have a taste of the original; though I fear the exact touch for generating lucid nonsense that characterized Douglas Adams’ prose has gone with him to the grave. However, it is no criticism of a book to say it is not another book. Adams’ talents were his, and as a child I loved both his writing and Colfer’s. The Artemis Fowl series gave me and my boyhood companions great pleasure, and I fondly remember The Supernaturalists as an imaginative and stimulating tale. Different books are different, and should be judged for what they are, not what they are not. That being said, one cannot wholly escape comparison when a piece is placed as a sort of capstone on another’s incomplete work.
Incomplete may not be the right word, though. Overcomplete or overgrown. Is there meant to be a barb in the joke, a five part trilogy? Here, I wrote a trilogy, says Adams, but the demands are for more and more. “In writing many books, there is no end.”
So, we had something that was complete, but not allowed to end; pushed beyond its end, it fell, first to sentimentality in So Long and Thanks for All the Fish and then into a meanspirited, hopeless rage in Adams’ final addition, Mostly Harmless. I am told he regretted that ending, meant to change it, and yet, endings are forced upon the race of man; no one knows the day nor the hour. So, I ask myself:
Is this book the ending Douglas Adams would have written?
No.
Is this an ending?
No. By its own admission, no.
Is it good?
Well, it was enjoyable. I’m glad I read it. I don’t think I’d urge anyone to read, though. Now and again, Colfer reaches an Adams like humor, but is never consistently all that funny, often ruining the punchline by following it up with an attempt to underline a meaningful insight. As well, Colfer’s high stakes adventures I loved as a child cannot be managed while cracking wise. Who will be invested in a battle with dragons along the rainbow bridge when Beeblebrox is the hero and the heart of gold makes the mostly assured doom impossible?
Colfer’s choice of title is telling, though I don’t know if he sees the indictment is against himself. It comes from Adams’ own writing, and the fuller quote is there on the back of the book: “Like a man saying ‘And another thing’ twenty minutes after admitting he’s lost the argument.” You can’t just keep adding semicolons.
“The end of a thing is better than its beginning” but this book is all beginning, all promise fundamentally at war with any hope of fulfillment.
Tale Told 