The Story

From the back of the book:

Just as Arthur Dent’s sense of reality is in its dickiest state he suddenly finds the girl of his dreams. He finds her in the last place in which he would expect to find anything at all, but which 3,976,000,000 people will find oddly familiar. They go in search of God’s Final Message to His Creation, and, in a dramatic break with tradition, actually find it.

The Response

I am going to dub this year the year of attempting to finish series/trilogies/sagas/etc. Really. Because this is the least amount of time that I’ve ever spent between Hitchhiker’s books.

I will fully admit that I enjoyed this one much better than the second and third in the series. In fact, I may go so far as to say that it was as enjoyable as the first in the series.

And I may have to go back on my “omg hate Arthur Dent” thing that I felt after the last book, because he was so much stomachable in this installment. The lack of character growth really didn’t matter too much in this one because he wasn’t being thrown into all kinds of new and horrible circumstances that he wasn’t learning from. In fact, he wasn’t even out exploring the universe for the good majority of the book – he spent most of the book on earth courting some lovely girl by the name of Fenchurch.

Fenchurch was a little boring, but that certainly seemed to suit Arthur Dent quite well.

The highlight of this book was definitely Adams’ humour and randomness. For example, I don’t typically like epilogues at all, but the fact that this one ended with “There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler’s mind.” made it pure gold. Instead of pretending that it doesn’t exist, I would definitely have to say that this was quite possibly one of the best epilogues I have ever read.

Even though Shannon has told me to skip Mostly Harmless, I think I will attempt it anyway, if only so that I may have this series completed.

The Bottom Line

An enjoyable installment in the series, on par with the first in the series.