So Long And Thanks For All The Fish - Douglas Adams

I've said (or maybe just thought) before, that a big part of the appeal of the Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy series is in finding the mundane amongst the extraordinary. Constantly undercutting otherwise magical worlds with bathos and banality, Arthur Dent has, at his best, been a vessel by which to find the disappointingly ordinary amongst the most extraordinary star systems. With So Long And Thanks For All The Fish, however, Arthur returns home to Earth, where, due to his adventures (and his relatively newly acquired knowledge of self-propelled flight), he is now the extraordinary one.

With this shift, the whole tone of the series changes. Instead of manically scrambling to acquire enough knowledge to get him through the day, Arthur returns to his day-to-day life back home, reversing (if not altogether removing) the usefulness of his character. Instead of having his bumbling incompetence help guide us through inexplicable worlds, we have a somewhat more cool and confident Arthur showing us more about his own character than the world around him. When he's in control of his own life, in a familiar-looking location, Arthur loses most of what makes him remarkable, leaving only flight and experience him to distinguish him from anyone else on Earth. So, to pass the time, we are introduced to new characters for Arthur to meet, each distinguishable thanks to some special trait Douglas Adams bestowed upon them.

One of these is the so-called "Rain God," who feels more like an idea the author couldn't keep off of the paper, rather than an actual character. He's a caricature whose reappearances demand an importance that never comes to fruition. By the end, he sort of becomes a way to criticize the businesses of news-making and science, but it's done in such a cut-and-dry, self-aware, satirical way that it hardly feels worth the effort of introducing him in the first place.

At one point, Adams jumps in to seemingly respond to the criticism he is anticipating. He questions whether or not the audience wants to be reading about Arthur's personal life, and suggests that anyone who is bored with the current passages should skip ahead to the end. There, he promises, you'll find out what has happened to some of the more colourful characters in the series. In this section, he implies that reader boredom would be due to not caring about Arthur Dent, thinking that readers are only interested in the fringe characters, seemingly challenging them to stick it out at risk of being considered too simple to understand the complexities of a real flesh-and-blood human character. What he fails to anticipate is that Arthur Dent is, and should be, a fairly unnotable man, and that by putting a boring man into a boring situation, he is encouraging us to celebrate the unremarkable circumstances of an unremarkable situation. Everymen are effective when trying to see how people would react in extraordinary circumstances. Otherwise, we might as well be reading about our own daily lives.

It's not until Arthur and his friends (one new) leave Earth that he regains his place in the Universe. It's odd, but to imagine Arthur Dent buying a postcard at the Grand Canyon seems commonplace, but to read about him, surrounded by gift shops on a planet that has turned "God's Last Message To His Creation" into a tourist trap, puts our own commercialization of nature into relief. Our own actions don't seem all that bizarre until we see others, in a slightly different context, doing exact same that. It's then that we say "Oh, how ridiculous," and soonthereafter follow it up with "Hey, wait a minute." Instead, So Long And Thanks For All The Fish depends on awkward dialogue and larger-than-life characters to stand out amidst Arthur rediscovered, ordinary home, a place where he brings little to our attention, and gets very little of it in return.