Most craft give a nod, however brief and unfriendly, toward beauty. Vogon ships did not nod toward beauty. They pulled on ski masks and mugged beauty in a dark alley.
I really wanted to like And Another Thing, Eoin Colfer’s sequel to the late Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide series. In the end, however, I can only recommend it under very specific circumstances.
I still believe that if you read the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, you should just stop at So Long And Thanks For All the Fish. If you got talked into reading the fifth book Mostly Harmless like I did, then you should take a look at And Another Thing, because it fixes some of the horrible things Adams did to his characters. The newest book doesn’t quite live up to my expectations, but it’s still better than Mostly Harmless. (Which isn’t saying much, because I disliked Mostly Harmless pretty intensely. My review of it is here. Fair warning: there’s a lot of ranting.)
And Another Thing starts off a few seconds before the end of Mostly Harmless, and while Colfer doesn’t resort to the “it was all a dream” tactic, he gets pretty close. I didn’t have a problem looking past that, not only because he didn’t have much of a choice given the ending of Mostly Harmless, but also because Colfer does a wonderful job of channeling Adams’ quirky writing style. For the first few chapters I was nicely distracted by the quips and clever, random comments popping up every few sentences.
After a while, unfortunately, his nods towards the previous books seemed less subtle. Some of the references to Adams’ more popular lines were so obvious, it felt like Colfer was nudging you with an elbow saying “See? That line there? That’s straight out of The Restaurant At the End of the Universe! Remember that one?” It’s not a bad thing, I loved those lines too, but I would’ve preferred if Colfer wrote some new, wittier lines. He’s very good at it, and he could have toned down the repeats of Adams’ material.
“And I myself,” continued Ford in a voice so superior it would have caused single-cell life forms to accelerate their evolution so that they could use their fab new opposable thumbs to pick up a rock and beat him to death.
I was glad to see all the main characters were back. Colfer even addressed some of the things that really bothered me in Mostly Harmless. Trillian, for example, admitted that leaving your child with someone you barely know probably won’t win you any parenting awards. She seemed to be more like the Trillian we all knew in earlier books. It’s a pity her actions near the very end of And Another Thing make me think she didn’t grow up as much as we would’ve liked, but nobody’s perfect.
Ford and Zaphod are back to their old, wonderful selves, and I don’t have any problems with their characters at all. They’re just as cheerfully and obliviously insane as you could want.
Arthur’s back too of course, and for the most part I liked the direction Colfer took with him. He seemed to have grown a bit of a backbone, not enough to make him unrecognizable, but I liked that people were shouting at him less. However, I still think the perfect ending for Arthur was in So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. Colfer apparently likes treating Arthur just as badly as Adams did. Poor Arthur, he can’t catch a break.
Like Adams, Colfer prefers to juggle several different storylines at once. Unfortunately the separate stories never connected all that well. Everything was resolved, everything made sense, and it all contributed to the overall plot. But I kept thinking to myself: “is all of this absolutely necessary?” If you cut out any of the things like Trillian’s daughter’s “husband,” the infidelities of the personal trainer’s wife, or Wowbagger’s computer being in love with Thor, no one would have minded, and the story wouldn’t have suffered.
I do admire Colfer for taking on this project, it couldn’t have been easy with Adams’ shadow standing behind him the whole time. Like I said earlier, if you want to read the Hitchhiker’s Guide series, you should stop with So Long and Thanks For All the Fish. And if you want to read some great Eoin Colfer writing, his Artemis Fowl series is very fun. But if you accidentally read Mostly Harmless, then I’d recommend And Another Thing. It’s not as good as I would have hoped, but there are some very clever parts, and it leaves you feeling a lot better than Mostly Harmless.