Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #221783 in Books
• Published on: 1985-05-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Excerpted from So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish by Douglas Adams. Copyright © 2002. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
" There is, for some reason, something especially grim about pubs near stations, very particular kind of grubbiness, a special kind of pallor to the pork pies. Worse than the pork pies, though, are the sandwiches. There is a feeling which persists in England that making a sandwich interesting, attractive, or in any way pleasant to eat is something sinful that only foreigners do.

'Make 'em dry,' is the instruction buried somewhere in the collective national consciousness, 'make 'em rubbery. If you have to keep the buggers fresh, do it by washing 'em once a week.'

It is by eating sandwiches in pubs on Saturday lunchtimes that the British seek to atone for whatever their national sins have been. They're not altogether clear what those sins are, and don't want to know either. Sins are not the sort of things one wants to know about. But whatever sins there are are amply atoned for by the sandwiches they make themselves eat."

Customer Reviews

Running on empty
Following a highly productive breakthrough period when he was simultaneously knocking out scripts for both Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and Doctor Who, Douglas Adams famously struggled with writer's block during the later half of his career as a novelist. Previous Hitchhiker novel Life, the Universe and Everything was itself a re-worked Doctor Who story, and by the time of 4th Hitchhiker novel So Long, And Thanks For All The Fish you can feel the author struggling to find a story to tell.

If there is a problem with this novel, it's that there simply isn't enough story here. Previous instalments in the Hitchhiker's series may have been short, but they were packed with fantastic mind bending SF concepts, which are almost entirely absent here. The main storyline consists of Arthur Dent returning to a mysteriously no-longer-destroyed Earth, and having a romance with Fenchurch, the girl who in a throwaway line in the original Hitchhiker's novel had a divine revelation on how to achieve world peace just before the Earth was destroyed by the Vogons. Arthur and Fenchurch's romance is touching, especially a chapter where they both fly through the clouds together, but storywise it doesn't really go anywhere - the identity of Earth's saviours is fairly evident from the books title (though incidentally, why is there a picture of a sea lion on the cover - misdirection?), and Fenchurch never remembers her divine plan for world peace.

At the end Adams tags on a coda where Arthur and Fenchurch meet up with Ford Prefect and Marvin (who dies, again) to read God's Last Message To His Creation, following up on the finale of Life, the Universe and Everything, but if anything this feels almost tagged on simply to please the fans of the previous novels. The only ideas that are original to this book, such as the unwilling Rain God, or Wonko's inside-out asylum, are mildly amusing but nothing more.

So Long, and Thanks For All The Fish is by no means a bad novel, and thanks to Adams prose it is engagingly readable, but it is a novel all about character - specifically having a few nice things happen to Arthur Dent for a while- and sorely lacking in plot, so don't expect anything much to actually happen beyond Arthur's romance. A pleasant read for fans of the previous 3 novels in the series, but by this stage Douglas Adams just seems to have run out of ideas, and was grinding a novel out for the sake of it.

Poor
I'm sometimes surprised when people find part of a series not as good as the rest. This time, I see it from a different perspective. The best parts of the real "trilogy" were when Arthur Dent was trying to get to terms with the overall differentness of space - the nutri-matic, Improbability Drive, and so on. But this book is merely about Arthur Dent's "exciting" adventures on Planet Earth. The romance with Fenchurch is far too "real" for these books, and has little of the zaniness I expected - more like a cheap romance novel. The only interest is when Arthur leaves the planet to meet space again, and the bits with Ford. I'd recommend it to fans perhaps, if only for the sense of completeness. But read this, then read the original, and see the difference in plot and quality.

Where have all the dolphins gone?
This fourth novel in the inexplicably inaccurately named "Hitchhiker's Trilogy" is the easiest to read so far, the funniest, and the most down to earth.

Down to earth, that is, once you discount the flying romance into which our hero Arthur Dent willingly throws himself, completely forgetting to come down. Yes, this is a romance novel - Arthur and Fenchurch flying to the sea, K-I-S-S-I-N-G!

A Zaphod-free zone, Adams introduces hilarious new characters, such as the Rain God and the raffle ticket lady, with guest appearances by Ford Prefect and my favorite Marvin.

Mysterious fish bowls with cryptic inscriptions, disappearing dolphins, an inside-out house (not an inside out-house) and of course, a final message from God himself, round out this hilarious book.

Unfortunately, you won't appreciate it fully without reading the preceding three novels, so get busy - it's well worth your time.

Amanda Richards