Douglas Adams’ “The Restaurant at the End of the Universe” is a rare species in my book collection. It’s one of the only books to have ever made me laugh. Normally that’s a cartoons job. I don’t mean “chuckle” or “wheeze” in a discreet way: I mean guffaw. I loved reading this book. I like parodies, cynicism, sarcasm, and works that compile these things together like The Onion which means that a book overflowing with this sort of stuff really makes my day whenever I get the urge to read something.
To sum things up, this book was actually a sequel to another cleverly written book by Adams, “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”; the aforementioned object is a guide that pops up occasionally in separate chapters as helpful “advice” (purely non-informational tidbits to the protagonists that serve only to amuse the reader). After the events of the first book; where the main protagonist Arthur Dent – unassumingly average human male, has his home planet destroyed by an alien race called Vogons so that they can build an intergalactic highway. He goes on an adventure with his friend Ford Prefect – an alien from a planet near Betelgeuse who pretended to be human and owner of a Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (which effectively contains a crude Wikipedia article on practically everything in the Universe from the common to the obscure), Zaphod Beeblebrox – a hedonistic and narcissistic two headed three armed Betelgeusian alien/Galactic President, Trillian –Zaphod’s girlfriend and mathematician, and Marvin – a generally insufferable robot who’s uncharismatic, constantly depressed, and paranoid, due to him having a “prototype human personality. In their journey through space, they discovered that the answer to the Universe’s greatest question was 42 and that Arthur’s home planet, Earth was actually commissioned and bought by mice so that they could figure out what exactly was the big question that accompanied the answer 42 (being that Earth was actually a mechanism thought up by the mice’s great computer Deep Thought, that would have gradually revealed the great question amongst it’s native inhabitants within give or take 8 million years).
Immediately after the events of the first book, our intrepid question seeking heroes are under heavy fire by a Vogon ship. When all seems lost, Zaphod conjures his ancestor, Zaphod the 4th (It’s backwards thanks to a mishap with a time traveling descendant) who transports them away right after heavy lecturing of his great great great grandson. Zaphod and Marvin are apparently the only survivors of their instant transport as the others (and their ship) are nowhere to be seen. The former then decides to seek out the person with actual “power” - Zarniwoop, since his position as Galactic President (ex) was merely just a figurehead. To find him he goes through a torture device called the Total Perspective Vortex (which liquefies it’s victims brain by revealing to it the Universe in it’s entirety) and he emerges unscathed and with the belief that he did so because he is the most important thing in the Universe (the explanation for how he survived was that he was actually in a fake Universe built specifically for him). He finds Zarniwoop and he finds out that his ship was actually shrunk to the size of a pea and hidden in his shirt pocket along with everybody else. They are transported to the nearest restaurant Milliways; The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (in terms of space. It’s actually 576,000,000,000 years into the future in the same exact location). After a hilarious encounter with a talking cow and rock star feigning death (for tax purposes), the dynamic team is separated by their teleporter once again with Zarniwoop, Zaphod and Trillian off to find the person who’s “really really really” in charge and Arthur and Ford on prehistoric Earth (which was conveniently rebuilt). Zarniwoop finds the Ruler of the Universe who is in fact an old hermit who lives alone with his cat. He doesn’t believe in anything, even his own cat and refuses (or perhaps unable) to see the weight and value of his position. Arthur and Ford on the other hand discover that the human race was actually descended from bumbling tourists from another planet which meant that Arthur did not have the “great question” locked in his subconscious (as evident by him randomly pulling out scrabble letters to spell “What do you get when you multiply six by nine”).
Obviously, the premise of Adam’s novel is just insane after discounting all notions that this is sci-fi comedy book. Thus the only really believable character is Arthur since he’s gotten over that “Ohmigoshmyplanetsbeendestroyed” phase in the first book already and he acts pretty much like any Average Joe would in the face of situations like he’s presented with in the second book (at least in my opinion). He doesn’t have a second head or a third arm, he’s not manic, and though he does tend to freak out sometimes when in danger of death (like anyone else would), he is a man of simple tastes. In fact, at the beginning of the book, the only reason why their ship is unable to defend against the Vogons is because the ship was expending all it’s resources on trying to make a regular cup of tea for Arthur; which he previously asked for since he missed his home. He’s the most normal out of the group with Trillian coming at a close second. A trend I noticed in the book was that there’s always something up with a new character; not necessarily a flaw but a quirk of some kind. There’s Ford and his ridiculous guide, Zaphod and everything about him, the Ruler of the Universe and his apathy/unawareness of everything, Marvin and his extreme depression, and other side characters like Hotblack Desiato who refuses to speak not because he’s mute but because he’s actually dead to avoid paying taxes.
By making these outrageously eccentric characters, it’s really easy for the author to catch my attention. Unoriginal, cliché, and uninspired characters tend to bore me so these types of people really add a breath of fresh air; especially when a new character shows up every other chapter or so. There’s also the way that Adam’s writes, which is satirical to the point that it makes fun of almost everything in the book; implying something is ridiculous even though the characters in the book regard it as truth and are not aware of how stupid something actually is. For example, the namesake of the book is just absurd. A restaurant that capitalizes on the end of the Universe? They even mention the other restaurant which markets the other end of the Universe; the big bang. The most interesting tidbits of the book come in the form of small stand alone chapters which provide extra detail on a current situation or some kind of background information. They normally begin with “According to the Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy…” and serve as actual pages from the guide. Even though they’re fairly useless and provide nothing of informational value to the characters (as if a third grader went to town on a Wikipedia page on microeconomics) I like the way that it ends up insulting some poor alien race or element on it’s stupidity, looks, or for being a misfit.
There were some scenes which stood out to me, and they weren’t even all that important to the plot. They did make me laugh though and I promise you that if you read this, you’d laugh too. One of the funniest scenes was when the group arrives at the restaurant Milliways and order the Dish of the Day. It turns out that this dish is a talking cow bred to invite people to eat it so they get into a rather uncomfortable conversation with it (at least for Arthur). He actually considers going vegan and orders a green salad instead of succumbing to the cow’s promises of a sumptuous flank steak by “exercising it and eating plenty of grain”. The cow even admonishes his order by saying that he’s spoken to the vegetables and claims that they don’t want to be part of a salad much less eaten all together. When the cow receives all their orders, it actually says “I’ll just nip off and shoot myself” and makes a point to add in “I’ll be very humane.” just for Arthur.
Another particular scene that had me laughing was when Zarniwoop and Zaphod come upon a run down shack to find the ruler of the Universe who just turns out to be an old curmudgeon who lives alone with his cat. He’s so unaware of everything that he doesn’t believe anything exists outside of his personal bubble (1 foot around him) including his own pet cat which he dubiously calls “The Lord” much to the confusion of the duo when they ask if he believes in a god. The sheer unlikelihood that “the grandmaster”, the “big cheese”, the “overlord”, being an old man combined with the fact that he does not acknowledge the notion that his actions affect the entire Universe – the great big giant thing so big that being compared next to it can kill you; just struck an odd note with me.
The final scene that I found witty in probably the simplest way possible was a scene where Arthur tries to rationalize eating potentially poisoned fruit to Dent by comparing it to the Adam and Eve story. Of course, since Dent is a foreign visitor, he summarizes the entire story in an overly simplistic and possibly offensive way (at least to Christians). He does this by implying God is an idiot for putting an apple in the middle of a garden with two people saying “Do what you want but don’t eat this apple”. The way he describes God catching them (God leaps from behind a shrub and says “Gotcha”) was unexpected but is what cemented this image firmly in my brain.
(Which is what God probably said after catching Eve eating the damn apple.)
I wouldn’t change anything about this book but if I really wanted to, I would add in more chapters with the Hitchhikers guide speaking. Those are always a treat. I did notice that the chapters were used to provide background information on completely imaginary objects (to the real world) I remember that in the first book, it had a little more entries on real day to day items like towels for example. I think a satirical spin on cats or limousines would have been really “informative”. After all, if the first book had the guide explaining how a towel could be used as a wipe, towel, shelter, scratching post, and offensive weapon when moistened, I think Adams could have done the same with other random items that were in this book.
(Semiautomatic AND an effective weapon? No.)
After reading this book, I had a variety of thoughts flying around my brain. The first thing is that I discovered that Arthur did not contain the matrix necessary to decipher the answer to the Universe and Everything in between (42). An important thing I also realized was that the real Universe is located in one’s own mind (as evident by the seemingly bat-crazy Ruler of the Universe). I slept on it a little while and I realized that out of all the characters in the series, he was the only one content with his life. All he had was his cat “The Lord”, his shack, and the constantly raining micro-planet he inhabited. He didn’t constantly search for something like any of the other characters. All he did was feed his cat old leftover fish and figure out that you can use a pencil and paper together to write unlike the other characters who constantly searched for a higher power, a restaurant, or tea.
(He's pretty much this guy.)
As for recommending this book to my friends, I think it would really depend on the type of person; somebody who understands satire, irony, and sarcasm in a written form. They should also be able to handle being insulted by the very book they’re reading (which is rare and very subtle). Thus, I would ask a person that I knew shared humor similar to mine and I would not even dream of presenting it to someone who didn’t get complicated jokes (British humor). I’m pretty sure most of the stuff they talk about would fly over an ordinary persons head even though they don’t even exist. I found plenty of made up jargon that would turn off the average low attention span yobo that schools tend to have so I also don’t think it should be prime reading material in most classes. I think it should serve a more recreational purpose though that doesn’t mean that it couldn’t be used in class. It could be used for a variety of purposes such as a reinforcement for lessons in satire (which this novel; nay, the entire series is brimming over the edge with). Excerpts can be taken out and studied, analyzed, and overanalyzed so that the full meaning of the passage can be taken in full and the guys sitting in the back can finally whip their heads back, laugh in an obnoxious manner, and say “I get it!”.
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