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From Herring to Marmalade: The Perfect Structure of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

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From Herring to Marmalade: The Perfect Structure of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

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From Herring to Marmalade: The Perfect Structure of Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency

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Published on July 27, 2017

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You know those polished wooden egg puzzles that people buy for you, the kind that are beautiful when they’re an egg but that fall apart into shards that seem impossible for mortals to reassemble? Then maybe after a lot of trying suddenly all these impossible three dimensional jigsaw pieces suddenly slot together and you have a lovely fragile egg again?

Douglas Adams’s Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency always reminds me of one of those.

I didn’t read it for ages. It wasn’t that I didn’t like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, it was just that I thought the plot had rather fallen apart in the later books. Indeed, the “throw in everything including the kitchen sink and St Anselm’s ontological proof of the existence of God” style of the Hitchhiker books had lent the series high initial energy but did not lead to continuous plot, or even necessarily making sense. They were inventive and amusing, but he seemed to be juggling too many balls and letting a lot of them drop. I wasn’t in a hurry for more Douglas Adams in 1987. I didn’t get around to picking Dirk Gently up until Emmet insisted on lending it to me in the mid-nineties.

I read it for the first time on the train, the long six hour (if nothing went wrong) train journey between Cambridge and Lancaster. I read it with a five year old Sasha reading Tintin and Asterix comic books beside me and asking (admirably rarely) if we were nearly at Crewe yet and (regrettably frequently) to explain a pun to him. (There’s nothing like discovering how much sheer context and world knowledge a pun requires like explaining the puns in Asterix to a five year old.) Despite the inauspicious circumstances, Dirk Gently kept making me giggle, whereupon I resolutely refused to read the funny bits aloud. “You’ll want to read this yourself one day,” I said, and time proved me right. When he read it, aged about twelve, he loved it.

I’m going to give you one example, the one that had me laughing so helplessly on the train that people were turning around to look and poor five year old Sasha was embarrassed to be seen with me. Dirk Gently has a holistic detective agency of the kind that you’d expect to find in a Sheckley novel. Earlier, his secretary has torn out the middle of the dictionary to fit it into a drawer.

“Luckily,” he said, “You have come to exactly the right place with your interesting problem, for there is no such word as impossible in my dictionary. In fact,” he added, brandishing the abused book, “Everything between herring and marmalade appears to be missing.”

It’s the timing that’s so beautiful, and the unlikeliness of the words.

What brings me back to it isn’t the funny bits, though some of them remain funny long after they’ve stopped being surprising. (Dirk’s later offered a herring, and says there’s no such word in his dictionary… and all of this is build up and foreshadowing for something that is in our world but not in theirs, yet.) What’s beautiful about it is the way the plot looks as if it’s bumbling along tossing elements into the blender and making a big messy stew, just like Hitchhiker, and then suddenly it gives a glorp and assembles itself into a perfect precise layer cake. In retrospect, every element of the book makes perfect glorious sense and needs to be there. It all fits together, from the way the sofa won’t go either up or down the stairs to the appalling dinner conversation about music on Radio Three. Things that look like jokes and asides are actually all set up. Every piece fits with every other piece like a perfect machine. It’s almost impossible to summarise or synopsise because of this. If you wanted to tell someone about it you’d have to say “Well, there’s this time machine. And the person from Porlock. And ghosts. And Bach was written by aliens. And it’s SF and very funny and it all totally makes sense eventually.” I admire it no end.

There are very few other examples of books I re-read to glory in the way they’re put together. There’s Barry Hughart’s Bridge of Birds, and John James’s Not For All the Gold in Ireland and perhaps—another time travel story—Tim Powers’s The Anubis Gates.

This article was originally published in July 2008.

necessity-thumbnailJo Walton is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She’s published a collection of Tor.com pieces, three poetry collections and thirteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula winning Among Others. Her most recent book is Necessity. She reads a lot, and blogs about it here from time to time. She comes from Wales but lives in Montreal where the food and books are more varied.

About the Author

Jo Walton

Author

Jo Walton is the author of fifteen novels, including the Hugo and Nebula award winning Among Others two essay collections, a collection of short stories, and several poetry collections. She has a new essay collection Trace Elements, with Ada Palmer, coming soon. She has a Patreon (patreon.com/bluejo) for her poetry, and the fact that people support it constantly restores her faith in human nature. She lives in Montreal, Canada, and Florence, Italy, reads a lot, and blogs about it here. It sometimes worries her that this is so exactly what she wanted to do when she grew up.
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ChristopherLBennett
7 years ago

It’s amusing to hear you say that DGHDA’s plot is so cohesive, because its plot is largely a mashup of two of Douglas Adams’s three Doctor Who serial scripts, “City of Death” and the lost serial “Shada” (which was never completed due to a BBC strike — probably a key motivator for Adams’s decision to convert its plot into a book). I liked the Dirk Gently books better than the Hitchhiker’s Guide books (I think HHG was essentially a sketch-comedy series that worked better on radio or TV than in prose, though So Long and Thanks for All the Fish works better as a novel than the previous ones did), but it was distracting to see so many elements that were blatantly recycled from a Doctor Who story I knew well and one I hadn’t seen but had read about.

I wonder if that’s why both of the Dirk Gently TV series adaptations (the British one that leaves out all the fantasy/SF elements and the American/Canadian one that embraces them but moves the action to Seattle) have chosen to tell new stories rather than trying to adapt the books (although I think the British series loosely adapted a few things from the books) — because they can’t reuse any of the Doctor Who-based stuff like the time-traveling professor whose chambers are his timeship.

Avatar
7 years ago

I should probably read this.  I had the audio book on cassette, read by Adams, and I think I understood most of it, but it seemed that an awful lot was left out or didn’t quite make sense, but maybe that was the entire book.  I was a Doctor Who fan and had probably seen City of Death but didn’t know about Shada but in hindsight it makes perfect sense.

I’ve only seen the pilot episode of the Stephen Mangan version but I think they did a good job adapting it to a 1 hour format.  It had the time traveling cat, a mad time traveler trying to right a perceived wrong (probably more accessible to a general audience than the book version) and the old lady having murdered her husband over the cat was a nice addition.  I haven’t see the rest yet.

ChristopherLBennett
7 years ago

@2/StrongDreams: Oh, yes, I’d forgotten that the Mangan series’ pilot strongly implied that the cat had time-travelled, although I believe it left the matter ambiguous. That series did go in a much more grounded direction than the new one does.

Anyway, I do think the books are worth reading. Although the books’ Dirk Gently is very different from the tall, skinny, hyperactive young versions appearing in the two TV series. Book Dirk is short, chubby, middle-aged, slovenly, lazy, and prone to wear an odd red porkpie hat. I sort of imagine him as a cross between Eddie Valiant and Carl Kolchak, though English of course.

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a-j
7 years ago

In a UKTV documentary about Douglas Adams, (part of The South Bank Show series) Toby Jones played Dirk Gently which I thought then, and still think now, was the best casting of the character.

ChristopherLBennett
7 years ago

@4/a-j: Oh, I could see that, yes. The problem is, everybody seems to want Dirk Gently to be the Doctor. Stephen Mangan’s version was a bit like a cross between Tom Baker’s Doctor and Benedict Cumberbatch’s Sherlock, and Samuel Barnett’s Dirk is pretty much a dopier knockoff of Matt Smith’s Doctor.

Tessuna
7 years ago

I love this book so much. The most fun I had reading it for the first time was the fact I had no idea what it is. I mean, I’ve read HHG before, but at that point actually never heard about Doctor Who (wow, that seems so weird now) and thought: OK, this seems like a detective story. Why not. So there’s a ghost, right, but that doesn’t mean it’s SF/F… so the ending totally blew my mind, because time travelling was something I did not expect. And that bit when I understood the sofa mystery – one of the best moments of my life. I laughed for several minutes – not because it was funny, but out of sheer joy of all the little pieces clicking together.

Of the two series I like much more the new one.

@2 StrongDreams: If it is the same audiobook I have, then it is really the whole thing.

@3 ChristopherLBennett: If I remember it right, there was timetravelling in Mangan series. Maybe it seemed more grounded, but it really wasn’t. More boring, maybe. (I don’t know why, but I really didn’t like it.)

ChocolateRob
7 years ago

The description of Dirk I’ve always found funniest is an entry in the book’s TV tropes page –

Laser Guided Karma – Whatever Dirk claims to believe in order to extract cash from gullible people invariably turns out to really be true, but always in such a way that he looks bad, usually in such a way that he suffers physical or emotional trauma, and never in such a way that he gets the money.

ChristopherLBennett
7 years ago

@6/Tessuna: The sofa thing is brilliant. It’s an amazing piece of plot structure, the way it’s set up and paid off.

As for the Mangan series, as I said, my recollection is that Dirk asserted there was time travel, but it was left ambiguous (at least in the minds of the other characters) whether he was actually right. There were mild genre elements, but much more toned down than in the new series, which embraces the weirdness fully.

Avatar
7 years ago

Jo, I am so glad to see Bridge of Birds and Anubis Gates listed as books with similar perfectly constructed plots. Those are two of my favorites, and I still remember vividly finishing both and just being gobsmacked by how perfectly everything fits together. Clearly, I now need to go get the James book. 

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Longviewer
7 years ago

I was so pleased when this book clearly explained the Reagan administration’s defense strategy. And wow I had no clue about any series, time to surf on that topic..

Tessuna
7 years ago

@8 ChristopherLBennett: Maybe it was left ambiguous for Richard, but the story actually left no other explanation of what happened than time travel. And Susan knew for sure. But you’re right that the series is more grounded: it has time travel, but manages to leave out all the truly fantastic stuff: the sofa and Monk and Coleridge and Bach and ghost and spaceship and the music… I almost forgot how I love that bit where Richard hears the music and he is the only one who really gets it.

So, even if the Mangan series seems closer to the book (it has characters with the same names, basically), I think that Barnett series – with completely new characters and plot and even with Dirk being quite different from the book Dirk – somehow manages to be more faithful adaptation.

ChristopherLBennett
7 years ago

@11/Tessuna: I’d say they both choose to adapt different aspects of the books, and so they complement each other. It’s an interesting illustration of the selectivity that goes into adapting a story, the way that different choices of what aspects to emphasize can lead to radically different results.

Still, of course, the best version to get the full experience is pretty much always going to be the original work. Which is another reason I didn’t think Hitchhiker’s Guide worked that well in book form — the books were just adaptations of something created for radio. The later books got away from adapting the radio show and did their own more novelistic thing, but they were still using the characters and world and sensibilities created for what was basically a sketch comedy show whose “world” was just a flimsy excuse to jump from sketch to sketch, and so that world didn’t feel as cohesive as Dirk Gently’s world did.

Tessuna
7 years ago

@12 ChristopherLBennett: I’d say they don’t complement each other. One adaptation used some of the source material, one did not; one is (or at least I think it is) awesome, one I really don’t care about. I’ts just I expected it to be the other way around, and am still surprised that I ended up loving the Barnett version and disliking the Mangan version.

But maybe it’s the fact that Mangan version used some of the book, but did it badly. I mean, what is the point of calling one character Gordon Way, when it is a completely different person from book Gordon Way? Is Susan the doctor the same character as Susan the cellist? Is “adaptation” even the right word for this? – but maybe we shouldn’t call the Barnett version an adaptation, either. It is more like a sequel.

You’re right about Hitchhiker’s Guide.

ChristopherLBennett
7 years ago

@13/Tessuna: Lots of adaptations use existing character names for completely different characters — e.g. Arrow‘s Felicity Smoak, whose only similarity to the Firestorm antagonist is that she works with computers, or Agents of SHIELD‘s Lance Hunter, whose only similarities to the John Steed-knockoff character in the comics is that he’s English and works in intelligence. (The comics’ Hunter worked for the UK counterpart of SHIELD rather than for SHIELD itself.) There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with an adaptation remixing and reinventing ideas from the original; the word “adapt” does mean “change,” after all. The goal is not merely to copy, but to create something new that uses the original work as a starting point. Some of the most beloved adaptations ever are radically unlike their source material (e.g. Universal’s Frankenstein, Blade Runner, and the Bill Bixby Incredible Hulk), while some of the most poorly regarded adaptations are slavish in all the wrong ways (e.g. Gus Van Sant’s Psycho remake or, arguably, Zack Snyder’s Watchmen). What matters isn’t how faithful it is, but how good it is. And the way to make a story good is to make it your own, to make it work on its own terms and become what it needs to be, regardless of how similar or different that may be to the source.
 
So maybe the BBCA version works better than the Mangan version because it’s more about capturing the spirit of the work than the letter. The first adaptation tried to adapt some of the characters and plot threads and specific moments from the books, but in a way that toned down and domesticated them, that shied away from the wild imagination and lunacy that characterized Douglas Adams’s work. Whereas Max Landis’s BBCA adaptation doesn’t bother to replicate the specific characters and plot points, but wholeheartedly embraces the lunatic sensibilities of the premise. Good adaptations are about capturing the spirit and meaning of the work, not the surface forms and details.