Friday September 30, 2005 Salmon of Doubt / Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
Recently I've been viewing two of the works of Douglas Adams. Spoilers ahead, so if that bothers you yada yada yada...
The first one is The Salmon of Doubt, the last book (so far) from Douglas Adams, and published posthumously. It's work from Adams that hasn't been collected together before and includes several chapters from the last novel(s) that he was working on. Several people have been involved in putting this book together, including his friends, wife and editor(s). Both fiction and non-fiction is included.
Whereas it's great to read pieces from Adams that I'd never read before, especially ones that delved into his character, personality and life style, I ended up being frustrated by this book. I thoughly enjoyed the non-fiction but the chapters from his next novel were another story (no pun intended). Eleven chapters. About eighty pages in total. The story is just getting going and then the writing just stops. No story plotline even giving us an idea of how he might have planned to end it. But that's the crux of the matter. He's been procrastinating over this story for years with no idea how to finish and publish it.
Some of the pieces in the book that have previously appeared in magazines and newspapers, have inspired me to want to check out the works of other authors. In particular Richard Dawkins for his theories on evolution and Ruth Rendell for some good mysteries which include great character studies.
Onto the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Last year, when it was announced that there was finally going to be a movie released, I got all excited. When the mediocre to poor reviews started coming in, we decided not to see it on the big screen, but wait for it to come out on DVD.
We bought the DVD about a week ago and watched it last weekend. I now wish we'd waited to just see it on "Pay-Per-View" or "On Demand" (or whatever Comcast is calling it this week). The Salmon of Doubt gave the impression that Douglas Adams was actively working on the screenplay and was expecting Jay Roach (of Austin Powers fame) to direct it. This was about 2000-2001, just before Adams died. His fans will know that the movie project has been on and off virtually since when the book was first published, over twenty five years ago.
The actual film was released this year and was directed by Garth Jennings who, as far as I can see, hasn't really directed anything big. Now even though the credits give Douglas Adams as writing the screenplay, I really wonder how much he had to do with the final version.
I've heard the original radio series of Hitchhiker's on Radio 4 when it first came out. I've read the book and seen the TV series. I've even played the computer game that's very loosely based on the book. I've now seen the movie. I was really hoping that they wouldn't deviate too much from the original book. But they did, and I found it very annoying at times. Adams is a master dialogue writer. Why couldn't they just use his classic words rather than attempting to intermix new humour? Still, a lot of the deviation is so that they can wrap everything up nicely at the end of the film, so perhaps it's unavoidable.
But the thing that annoyed me the most (strangely enough) was Marvin. Alan Rickman does a great job of the voice, but the robot is totally the wrong shape. There is a scene where they are trying to rescue Trillian from prison. There is a robot there that would have been the perfect Marvin. Why didn't they use that?
Douglas Adams was an exceptionally good writer, but he was also a perfectionist. Always looking for the mot juste. If he was given the time to do things the way he wanted to, he produced excellent work. When rushed by deadlines ("I love deadlines. I love the whooshing sound they make as they go by" is a famous Adams quote) his work suffered accordingly. In both of the works mentioned above, there are examples of the great and the not so great.
( Sep 30 2005, 01:07:24 PM PDT ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [11]
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Posted by Sean Middleditch on September 30, 2005 at 03:53 PM PDT #
Posted by Sebastian Rittau on September 30, 2005 at 05:06 PM PDT #
Posted by Rich Burridge on September 30, 2005 at 06:31 PM PDT #
Almost all of the "new" ideas in it were his as I understand it, and he was well aware that a movie version could never be an exact reproduction of either the radio or book versions.
You've made a bit of a classic mistake though by assuming that the books came first. In fact the radio series came first. The books were written later and then the TV series was filmed.
None of those three official Adams versions are even consistent with each other, so it seems a bit unreasonable to insist a film is. If they were making a film of the book, or the radio series, fair enough, but they're making a film of the loose and maliable story that is The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy :)
Posted by Chris Jones on October 01, 2005 at 08:12 AM PDT #
Hi Chris,
Actually I made no such assumption. I even said above
I said "original book" above, because they re-released it 25 years later, and it wasn't quite the same.
I will agree that it isn't fair to assume that the movie should be consistent with one of the previous forms (there's even been a student stage show of some of this according to <em>The Salmon of Doubt</em>.
But I so wanted it to be faithful to the book (which is my favorite of the lot).
Posted by Rich Burridge on October 01, 2005 at 10:42 AM PDT #
Douglas Adams was an abysmal writer. Beyond about half of the first book, the entire series of 5 books got incredibly boring with very little reason for them existing. Paid by the word was what I was thinking as I struggled through book 4...Seriously it could have been cut in half.
Other books of his suffer from the same thing, The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul suffered from the same problem, in that it started off initially amusing, but eventually became very dull.
But the film was even shitter than the books
Posted by Iain on October 01, 2005 at 12:55 PM PDT #
Posted by Rich Burridge on October 01, 2005 at 04:12 PM PDT #
There are many things I think did not work in the movie. Marvin's new looks were not one of them.
Posted by Yosi on October 01, 2005 at 08:52 PM PDT #
Posted by fraggle on October 03, 2005 at 04:19 AM PDT #
I'd expect an author's entire catalogue of books to be great for them to be labelled as an "exceptionally good writer". But maybe thats just me?
I have not read Last Time to See, so I will not comment on it, but as for the rest
* Hitchhikers Guide was ok. Quite funny in places, but you could tell that the refining that had happened through the years had helped
* Restaurant at the end of the universe was dull and uninteresting and it was where I started thinking 'Hmmm, maybe I'll stop reading this stuff, it could be a waste of time?'.
* Life, Universe, Everything started with a few good jokes but went downhill.
In short, there are and were much better authors (in the same genre I'd suggest Robert Rankin and that half of Terry Pratchett's Discworld stuff is much better than anything Douglas Adams did, not to go anywhere near the true literary greats who would be embarrassed that DA was called an exceptional author) than Douglas Adams, who was, at best, incredibly overrated.
As a possibly pointless aside:
When I was 14 our english assignment was to write a parody. Based on my reading of the first 10 or so pages of Life, Universe and Everything, I decided to parody The Hitchhikers Guide To The Galaxy.
I got 84% and the comments that I'd obviously studied the books well.
Posted by iain on October 04, 2005 at 04:37 AM PDT #
Posted by Chris Jones on October 13, 2005 at 12:24 PM PDT #