Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
Posted: Sat Oct 14, 2006 7:12 am
Everyone breathing in the UK in last 20 years is aware of Douglas Adams's work most notably of course The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy - and most of us just love it! So I just cant quite understand why I never read this book before? Anyway that means I came to this novel with high expectations. It was to be witty, funny and intelligent and have a geat use of English. The characters were to be quirky but believable and the plot - well he does usually find a plot somewhere!
And I wasnt disappointed! You can almost open the book at random and find a great quote, "Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the business seriously." DNA could take something as mundane as sleep and find a twist - sleeping is taken for granted not seriously! I love his often used technique of absurdly anthropomorphising an every day object and attributing it with an inescapable melancholy: "It was a battered yellow Citroen 2CV which had one careful owner but also three suicidily reckless ones. It made its way up the driveway with a reluctant air as if all it asked from life was to be tipped into a restul ditch ... and there allowed to settle in graceful abandonment, ..."
I found the novel to have great pace, things were happening - maybe surreal but you have to read on. And its a good length at just ove 200 pages - many recent novels seem to drag things out to 400 or 500 pages.
I liked the characters and spotted bits of me in some of them - good bits and bad I guess. Andmost of it is set in the part of London I like best, so familiarity with the landmarks adds to the enjoyment and he picks up on other peoples unqestionably daft endeavours - why build a railway station, St Pancras, to look like a gothic cathedral? (Is St Pancras a real saint anyway? )
So I thought it was a good read and good fun and I give it 8/10 dropping two point for what I thought was a weak ending and a title I still dont understand .
So what did other people think? And Cagso what's the next book?
And I wasnt disappointed! You can almost open the book at random and find a great quote, "Sleeping was a very important activity for him. He liked to sleep for longish periods, great swathes of time. Merely sleeping overnight was not taking the business seriously." DNA could take something as mundane as sleep and find a twist - sleeping is taken for granted not seriously! I love his often used technique of absurdly anthropomorphising an every day object and attributing it with an inescapable melancholy: "It was a battered yellow Citroen 2CV which had one careful owner but also three suicidily reckless ones. It made its way up the driveway with a reluctant air as if all it asked from life was to be tipped into a restul ditch ... and there allowed to settle in graceful abandonment, ..."
I found the novel to have great pace, things were happening - maybe surreal but you have to read on. And its a good length at just ove 200 pages - many recent novels seem to drag things out to 400 or 500 pages.
I liked the characters and spotted bits of me in some of them - good bits and bad I guess. Andmost of it is set in the part of London I like best, so familiarity with the landmarks adds to the enjoyment and he picks up on other peoples unqestionably daft endeavours - why build a railway station, St Pancras, to look like a gothic cathedral? (Is St Pancras a real saint anyway? )
So I thought it was a good read and good fun and I give it 8/10 dropping two point for what I thought was a weak ending and a title I still dont understand .
So what did other people think? And Cagso what's the next book?