A fun read, if a bit heavy-handed on the similes. Mostly harmless.

I have to admit before starting here that I went into this book without high hopes. I have no previous reading experience with Eoin Colfer, being that this is his first adult novel and I was really too old for the Artemis Fowl books when they came out. Further, while the ending to Mostly Harmless was depressing, it was still a pretty solid ending, and I couldn't really see a way to either (1) get around it or (2) plot a story away from it.

To Colfer's credit, he does manage the first reasonably well; my suspension of disbelief was not overly taxed by the way he got around having almost all the main characters die in the previous book (uh, spoiler alert, I guess); at least, it was not that unbelievable in the context of the series.

However, this does not stop the book from being terrible, or at least terribly mediocre. To start with, Colfer fills the book with a ridiculous and ridiculously annoying number of references to the previous books, as if to say, "Hey guys! I read the other books! And you can tell I did because I know what a Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster is and what type of gases the Blagulon Kappans breathe!" In fact, it reminds me of nothing so much as the fourth season of Family Guy. For the uninitiated: Family Guy ran for three seasons before being canceled by Fox. However, it sold so well on DVD that, several years later, it was brought back, albeit with mostly different writers. This fourth season, especially the first episode of it, was notorious for bringing back one-time joke characters (like the Greased-Up Deaf Guy) for no good reason except to say to the audience, "See? We watched the other episodes!"

I think the worst case of this in AAT is when a being shows Ford and Friends a countdown on a digital readout. Ford murmurs, "Humans think digital watches are neat." Besides not being funny, this makes no sense since the person showing them the readout is not human and it's not in any way relevant -- except as a way of saying, "Look! I read the books!"

In fairness, this sort of thing does settle down after the first fifty or so pages, though it never entirely goes away.

The "Guide Notes" are also rather irritating. These are bits that are supposed to be from the Guide which literally take you out of the narrative -- they even have line breaks before and after them to indicate that they're not part of the story. Often they don't even make sense as Guide entries and are really just narrator asides. Worse, they occur all the time -- there are actually sections where you'll have two or three "Guide Notes" in the space of a page or two. It is really hard to care about the novel's plot when the book itself cares so little about it.

Furthermore, none of the characters really sound like themselves -- with the exception of Random, I suppose, who is even more of a brat than in Mostly Harmless. (You'd think a hundred years of simulated reality would've calmed her down some, but no.) Ford and Zaphod seem more or less the same, but somehow more detached, like they're both stoned off their asses the whole time and couldn't really give a damn about what happens. (This is literally true of Ford for one chapter of the book.) Trillian seems to have shed her earlier personality of a warm, highly-intelligent woman for shrill mother and man-chaser (who winds up marrying possibly the most unlikely person in the universe).

The character who really gets derailed, though, is Arthur. It's not just that he becomes, like Ford and Zaphod, a lot more detached from reality; it's also little things in the way he talks. For instance, how many times do you recall Arthur calling someone "mate" in the previous books? I'm rather sure the number is zero, but that doesn't stop him from doing it all the zarking time in this book. And for that matter, who does this quote sound like?:

"Ah, the infinite multitudinous possibilities of my home planet. The things I might have seen on another Earth, just down the probability axis. I might have made myself a nice cup of tea."

Does that sound like Arthur to you? I think if the Arthur from the first book heard someone say that, he would just goggle at him like he were speaking Mongolian.

(Incidentally, another extremely minor thing that probably annoyed me more than it should have: The number of times "frood" and related words are used. It's dropped more times in this book than in the entire rest of the series put together.)

Credit where it's due, though: Once I made it through the first fifty pages, the book progressed from bad to merely mediocre, and though I cringed through some parts, there were even a few good moments that made me laugh out loud.

That said, I'm not even really sure who this book was written for. I can't imagine HGTG fans enjoying it, with the annoying references-for-the-sake-of-references I mentioned and the total recharacterization of Arthur and, to a lesser extent, Ford, Trillian and Zaphod; and I can't imagine new readers enjoying it because half the time they wouldn't know what the fuck was going on, and the in-jokes would be completely lost on them.

In the end, Colfer gets an A for effort here, but a solid D on execution. It just reads too much like the sort of thing you'd see on fanfiction.net. ( )

The humour is there, and is very good. However, it seems to be less "social commentary" at the same time. More simple silliness. ( )

A fine enough attempt to pair a new writer in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series by Douglas Adams. The writing style by Eoin Colfer is similar but not exactly like Adams, which is both good and bad. It's not like Adams was perfection for every word (especially in Hitchhiker's novels, the Detective Gentley novels were a little more polished), but not everyone can pull it off. I found myself scanning a lot to get through awkward and/or boring scenes.

I think my biggest problem were the characterizations. Something felt very different or even wrong with both Trillian and Arthur. Maybe they were lost in the teeming amount of new and returning characters, or maybe I am influenced by the rather enjoyable film from 2005. Other issues: not enough time on Heart of Gold, a little too much detail on the Vogons, and while it was nice to have Thor pop over from Long Dark Teatime of the Soul, he was a completely different guy (god?). Zaphod's Left Brain thing was just weird. I did like the fleshing out of Wowbagger quite a lot, but points must be lost as (another reviewer pointed out) no Marvin!

I also really began to dislike the "Guide Notes" which were not as random or fun as Adams' asides. For one thing, why would the Guide be commenting on the actual people in the present story? And just too many of them. ( )

Quite obviously, Colfer has taken Adams' penchant for throwing everything into the mix to see what sticks to heart. The pages of And Another Thing... are teeming with the absurd asides that were the hallmark of HG2G's style. Admittedly, such tangents can get tiresome, and Colfer arguably uses a few too many funny words and silly noises, but Adams was hardly above a bad pun or two himself.

Not a lot of Colfer's plot makes any sort of linear sense, but the series has always had a great deal of fun playing with notions of time and space anyway. And it's rather wonderful to be with old friends again, especially the terminally unlucky Arthur, pining for his lost love Fenchurch; as Random succinctly puts it, "I'm sure you'll bring doom down on us all presently. It's your destiny to be a cosmic Jonah." I also enjoyed Colfer's attempts to better humanize Trillian, a character Adams never fully explored and who came across initially as flighty and later as just plain unlikeable. If there's a real fault with Colfer's attempt, it's in his trying to cram too much in; there's too many nods to past novels, too many inside references, too many bloody characters doing too much at once.

Read the rest of the review here. ( )