“. . . spirit? Has he no passion? Does he not, to put it in a nutshell, fuck?”

Those who wish to know should read on. Others may wish to skip on to the last chapter, which is a good bit and has Marvin in it.

I took it, at the time, as Douglas’s contempt for and discomfort with his audience, and was uncomfortable with it. Rereading it a quarter of a century later, I found myself reading those paragraphs as worried bluster, as if Douglas was scared that he was out of his depth, and was trying to respond to critics or to friends ahead of time. I still suspect that, had there been time to rewrite, to rethink, to revise, that strange breaking of the fourth wall and the author-reader compact might never have happened.

I do not think it would have been a better book for not having been finished in a hotel bedroom, while Sonny Mehta watched videos in the room next door. After all, it is part of its charm that So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish reads as if it has been not so much plotted as stumbled upon or backed into. It is surrealist in the way that only a book extracted from the author without pause for inspection, for second thoughts or thousandth thoughts, can be. Characters appear and fade, dreamlike. Reality is frangible. The novel circles one event: a couple making love naked in the clouds, in perfect flying magical dream-sex, an event that is practically a poem.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish has, beneath the elegant veneer, the simplest, easiest, most traditional of plots: boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl, makes love to her in the clouds and sets off with her to find God’s Final Message to His Creation. And does. After all, for a book suffused from start to finish with gloom and melancholia, a book in which the universe itself is fundamentally perverse, when it is not actually malicious, So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish is often peculiarly upbeat: chapter 18, for example, gives us, triumphantly, something unseen in the Hitchhiker’s universe until now: transient and barely recognizable, but it’s there: joy.

He hadn’t realised that life speaks with a voice to you, a voice that brings you answers to the questions you continually ask of it, had never consciously detected it or recognized its tones till it now said something it had never said to him before, which was “Yes.”

This was my introduction to Pan Books’ 2009 reissue of So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish.

Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones

Don’t read this introduction.

Read the book first.

I’m going to talk, in general terms, about the end of this book, and I’m going to talk about Diana Wynne Jones, and they intertwine (one made the other, after all), and it’ll be better for all of us if you’ve read the book before you read my introduction. It’s out of order and jumbled up, but that can’t be helped.