Review - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Reviewing ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ would, he knew, be something of a tall order. Just how tall he could not pinpoint, but surely somewhere between an Alp and a Hymalaya.

He thought briefly of prevarication. Then, because he wanted to avoid thinking about the review, he thought about prevarication some more. Doing this, he recalled that he had actually been due to consider prevarication last weekend, but had kept putting it off.

Perhaps he should approach the review in an unusual way. Sideways? Longways? Perhaps, he thought, he could write the review as a homage to Adams’s own style?

This plunged him into gloom. Trying to emulate a Master would be like trying to create a Medieval Feast flavour Pot Noodle; a fantastic idea when drunk, a lot more difficult than it sounded when attempted and ultimately leaving a nasty taste in the mouth.

He span in his chair for a while to see if this would stimulate anything. It did; a slight sense of nausea. Realising that he had not yet started to actually review the book he took comfort in the stories that Adams himself found it famously hard to get started on a story and was often blocked. One of the many differences between Adams and the reviewer resided in that word ‘famously’.

How then, to describe the novel. A novel where the eponymous Dirk is so cock-sure of himself that he only deigns to make an appearance in person a full one-third of the way into the book although, no doubt much to his pleasure, he has been the subject of fascinated discussion by other characters before this. The novel touches on time travel, Coleridge, sofas, quantum mechanics and the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

It starts with a Dons dinner at a Cambridge college, it continues with a murder, it continues more with the effect that murder has on the characters and concludes with a solution. Throughout, it packs in the sort of throwaway remarks that you want to pick up and carry around, waiting for the opportunity to pass off as your own in the certainty of being hailed as a genius.

If you are feeling a little blue, you should read this book and cheer yourself up. If you are already cheerful, you should read this to sustain your mood. If you are having relationship difficulties there is probably guidance for you within its pages, if you are happy in your relationship you should read this book with your significant other. If you are of an impressionable age, you should certainly read this book, it explains how the world really operates.

It also prompted me to pull down my copy of Coleridge and read him again for the first time in many years. It really does bring home the fact that there is nothing new under the sun (except for the plot of this book, which is original in all its parts). Coleridge runs through the plot like a streaker on a sports field – not one of those horrid thin modern streakers either who, although naked, are so covered in tattoos and piercings that they could be wearing an overcoat and top hat and be more revealing, no, I’m talking streakers in the 1970s, when a policeman’s helmet covered his shame or when posh girls getting their tops off made national news and a million men bite their pipe stems in half.

The reviewer was, very much like a streaker’s genitals when he miss-times a leap over the wicket, stumped. Simply giving the book five stars and gushing praise was not adequate. He recalled the late, great John Peel’s system of awarding songs stars, the more stars, the better the song. The story goes that Peel covered the cassette in-lay card for ‘teenage kicks’ with many stars and then went on to play it twice in succession on Radio 1, the first time this had ever been done and at a time when all music didn’t sound the bloody same anyway and so people actually noticed.

Ah, could the answer be so simple? Probably not? Would Dirk have approved? Probably not and so, with a smile, it was decided:

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