Outside of a Dog: Adams, Douglas: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency; The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (audio)

greythistle

greythistle wrote on March 12, 2005 at 1:50 PM:

Agreed on this pair's general superiority craft-wise to the Hitchhiker books. Does the pettiness of Tea-time help to balance (what I recall as) an increase in direct god-human contact? That is, the breakdown of that boundary needs not to be weighty, whence silliness, and the entities on both sides need to be flawed.... Funny--I'd forgotten about the Coleridge stuff till seeing your post. The Norse mythological admixture is what's stuck with me. (From before I was a medievalist--that isn't why.)

Kate

Kate wrote on March 12, 2005 at 8:20 PM:

greythistle: _Long Dark Teatime_ has much more god-human contact (I don't recall any in _Dirk Gently's_). I suppose the pettiness might balance it, or at least make it possible/necessary for Dirk to get involved, but I just don't enjoy reading about petty people, human or god. I have heard people speak admiringly of the portrayal of the Norse pantheon in _Long Dark Teatime_, which suggests to me that Norse mythology is probably not my cup of tea.

greythistle

greythistle wrote on March 13, 2005 at 12:05 PM:

Mm. The portrayal works well, but it feels very different to me from the texts from which we get all this stuff. The characters in the sagas are often petty, though. :)

David Tate

David Tate wrote on June 8, 2005 at 1:33 PM:

(Very late with this comment; sorry if it's long since scrolled off everyone's radar.) _Dirk Gently's..._ is almost unique in my experience, as being a book that I somewhat enjoyed the first time I read it, and then loved mightily the second time I read it. I don't know whether I was being particularly clueless and dense when I first read it, or whether it is a masterpiece of foreshadowing, plot structure, and The Fundamental Interconnectedness of All Things.

Kate

Kate wrote on June 8, 2005 at 1:43 PM:

David: I do think _Dirk Gently's_ works better the second time around, because you can see the clever worldbuilding thing and how all of it fits together; the first time I, at least, just wasn't sure what was going on. So either we're both clueless or it is a masterpiece--and I know which I'd prefer. =>