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After the success of the Hitchhiker's books, Douglas Adams could have spent the rest of his career writing variations on the same joke. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is the book where he tried something else. The result is one of his weirder and more interesting projects: a comic novel with a time-travel plot, an electric monk, an Electric Bath, an Electric Sofa stuck on a staircase, and the eponymous detective who solves cases by following whichever lead seems most interesting and billing the client for the holistic implications.
The structure of the book is challenging on a first read. Adams sets up half a dozen apparently unconnected mysteries and then ties them together in the last act in a sequence that is genuinely satisfying once you get there. The Coleridge material in particular is wonderful. The jokes do not arrive at Hitchhiker's density, but the ones that do land hit a higher emotional note than Adams usually reached for.
Four stars. Not for everyone. If you can ride with a book that is part Doctor Who script and part literary thought experiment, this is a small treasure.
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A novelization of the Douglas Adams computer game, written by Terry Jones. Half Adams, half Monty Python, all 90s eccentricity.
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