Douglas Adams - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Revisting a favourite book from many years ago can be like finding a long lost friend. So it was with Douglas Adam's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. I must have read this half a dozen times in the 1990s. But that means that there's a gap of nearly quarter of a century since I last opened it, and while I remembered it well, I think I had forgotten just how funny it is. I also had not remembered, or perhaps hadn't appreciated, the novels depths and the intricacies of the plot.

One of the amusing things about the book is that Dirk Gently, who appeared in one further complete novel, a radio play and a couple of TV series, doesn't appear until a third of the way through this, the first novel. The opening third of the novel is a series of apparently random and disconnected events. A robotic priest, programmed to believe everything it is told, rides a horse in an alien landscape. An absent minded history professor amazes a young girl at a Cambridge dinner, and Gordon Way (I am assuming this is a caricature of Clive Sinclair) a multi-millioniare software company founder, is murdered.

These stories will be connected. In fact they are connected through time and space with other, lesser events. Everything in the book matters, and readers will find on repeated readings that they notice more and more. All this, of course, goes with Dirk Gently's central idea - everything is connected. The universe links everything and solving mysteries is simply a matter of following everything to its conclusion - no matter how unrelated and random stuff appears. 

All of this is, of course, done within the framework of Douglas Adam's typical absurdist, chaotic and occasionally farcical story telling. It is what made me laugh thirty years ago, and what made me laugh again, and again, this time around. But I was also struck by something else. Adam's own fascination and embracement of new technology means that some parts of the novel would have seemed outlandish. One character downloads information from the internet (we assume a bulletin board of the time) and there's a good joke about the US militaries use of software. While none of the characters have mobile phones, in some ways this is a very modern novel.

When I first read this I used to joke that this was a convoluted novel that was really about how a sofa gets stuck in a stairwell. It is that. But there's so much else, and its made me very keen to reread the sequel and seek out the final, unfinished story that's collected in Salmon of Doubt. Douglas Adam's untimely death robbed us of so many great stories.

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