Life, the Universe and Everything
By Douglas Adams
In my note on The Restaurant at the End of the Universe I said how it rounded the original story arc of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy off. Which means Volume Three in the Trilogy of Five has to start things up again, and it does so with a mostly self-contained story about a violent gang of robots gathering together the various keys to the Wikkit Gate that will release the planet Krikkit from its Slo-Time envelope, an event which may result in the destruction of the universe.
Despite this fairly basic plot the novel itself is, as usual, an episodic, ramshackle affair that left me confused at various points as to what was going on. How did Arthur get transported to the Cathedral of Hate? What was Hactar up to? I had to do a lot of page-flipping to keep all this straight.
That said, there are some great characters and ideas introduced. The camouflage of SEP (Somebody Else’s Problem), the Campaign for Real Time (a response to pesky time travelers), and best of all Wowbagger the Infinitely Prolonged, whose deathless mission is to insult every single living being in the universe (Arthur, at least in the American version, is “a jerk . . . a complete asshole”). These almost make up for there being a lot less Marvin to enjoy.