2 out of 5

This is very much a sequel. It’s the first book on repeat, done at a louder volume – more offhand, more random – and with less actually happening. If you found Adams’ bits in the first book amusing, there’s plenty of that to like here as well, but it’s also pretty far removed from an actual story, to the extent that, when we arrive at the conclusion, it feels like the kind of revelation that likely should’ve happened within the first few chapters. It can effectively be summarized by the fact that its titular location shows up halfway through the book, and doesn’t matter at all. And if there’s a shrug in response to this, and that these aspects just underline the inherent ridiculousness of Hitchhiker’s, that’s fair, but I don’t think Adams uses that to turn it into an effective or affecting novel.

Structurally, things are the same: we started with a destructive event in book one, and that happens here as well, with the Heart of Gold crew in trouble, stuck with a malfunctioning ship and Volgons, ready to attack. The reasoning for this mayhap is very funny, if less social commentary than the previous setup, and more just a gag, but it’s a good one. The way out this time, though, will likely be where you make up your mind if you’re on board or not, as Adams’ solve is to use… mystic shit. Magic. This sidestep of logic – even within the loosey goosey logic of the series – relieves the writer from having to connect things too much in the pages that follow, and so instead of a series of skits loosely connected by a plot, we really just end up getting the skits. And it’s not that the jokes are unfunny, more that we restart every chapter to set up a new joke, and within that chapter take several diversions on other jokes, and then the payoff for the first joke has no relevance on the story – maybe even thematically – whatsover. It’s all distraction, to the extent that I can’t even say the characters exist in this book, sinking almost totally into the background while the gags play out.

There are, zoomed in, some great scenes, really brilliantly conceived. And when Adams is able to properly wind the joke into the text of the scene itself, the stuff flows; we hope there’s more of that going forward. Elsewise, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe has our characters chasing their tales for 200+ pages to track down the question to the answer, and they don’t discover very much helpful during those pages, up through the conclusion that kind of shrugs off the whole adventure with a “why worry about it?” dismissiveness.