The View from the Cheap Seats (33 page)

N
ote to the reader from the Introducer:
If you have not read this book before, and have come here having just read the previous three books, you should skip this introduction and go straight to the beginning of the book. I give stuff away here. There are spoilers ahead. Just read the book.

I'll be here when you get back.

No, I mean it.

I'll put down some asterisks. I'll see you after them, when you've read the book.

DOUGLAS ADAMS WAS
tall. He was brilliant: I've met a handful of geniuses, and I'd count him as one of them. He was a frustrated performer, a remarkable explainer and communicator, an enthusiast. He was an astonishing comic writer: he could craft sentences that changed the way a reader viewed the world, and sum up complex and difficult issues in aptly chosen metaphors. He combined the trappings of science fiction with profound social commentary and a healthy sense of humor to create fresh worlds. He loved computers, was an astonishingly fine public speaker. He was a bestselling author. He was a competent guitarist, a world traveler, an environmentalist, a man who held remarkably wonderful parties, a gourmand.

What he was not, and this may seem somewhat odd, especially when you consider how many of them he wrote and sold, and how famously well he wrote them, was a novelist. And this, I suspect unarguably, is the oddest of his novels.

So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
was Douglas's first attempt to write a novel from scratch.

In many ways it could be seen as an experiment. A transitional novel between the galaxy-spanning romps of the first three
Hitchhiker's
books and the more Earthbound adventures of Dirk Gently. It was, after all, the first of the three of Douglas's books not to have originated in the extraordinary period of creativity that took him from the creation of the
Hitchhiker's
radio series to the end of his time as script editor of
Doctor Who
. His first two books,
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
and
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe,
had strong foundations: they were built on the backs of the scripts that Douglas, and (for the second series) Douglas and John Lloyd, had crafted for the original
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
BBC Radio 4 series. The third book,
Life, the Universe and Everything
was adapted from an unused outline Douglas had written for a
Doctor Who
film,
Doctor Who and the Krikketmen
. His next book, the remarkable
Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency,
was adapted from Douglas's unfilmed
Doctor Who
story
Shada
(with a sprinkling of ideas from the filmed
Doctor Who
story
City of Death
).

The first
Hitchhiker's
books had been written by Douglas as a young man for a world that expected nothing, and were published as paperback originals. Now Douglas was, for the first time, being published in hardback. He was a bestselling novelist, who had not yet written a book he was proud of. This may partly have been because he was not a novelist.

Now he needed to write a book he had been paid a lot of money to write. His accountant had embezzled most of the money and then killed himself. Douglas Adams had gone to
Hollywood on his first, abortive, quest to get
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
made into a film. He had lived there for over a year, doing drafts of the film, did not have a good time there, and, surprised and a little battered, he had returned home to a little converted stable house off Upper Street in Islington, and, eventually, and under pressure, put off actually writing
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
.

His publisher, Pan, found themselves, early in 1984, soliciting a book that was, for the most part, unwritten and for that matter mostly unplotted. The lenticular image on the original cover showed a walrus that became a dinosaur, because Douglas had mentioned that there would be a walrus in the book.

There would be no walrus in the book.

It became part of the story of the book that, as the publishing date of the book got closer and the book got no closer to being written, publisher Sonny Mehta had taken a hotel suite and essentially locked Douglas in to write it, editing the pages as they came through. It was a strange way for a book to be written, and something Douglas used as an excuse for any problems that the book had.

But it was a book he was still particularly proud of when it came out. I remember that.

Douglas Adams had returned from America to Islington, and
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
occurs in the space that Southern California isn't. Which is to say that both Douglas's Outer Space and his Southern California are extremely Californian: the hotel in which rock stars read
Language, Truth and Logic
by the pool and the bar in which Ford Prefect attempts to pay his bill with an American Express card are not a galaxy apart, and the hooker who has a special service for rich people could exist as easily in one world as another.

Arthur Dent, in previous stories a flat character who existed mostly to boggle at the improbabilities, often infinite, he was confronted with, became someone significantly more like
Douglas. Douglas's return from America was echoed in Arthur Dent's return from hitchhiking across all of time and space to an Earth that the readers believed to have been destroyed, and his explanation to the world that he had been in America.

It might be seen as a problem for a writer who was considered a social satirist to have, a few pages into the first book in a bestselling series, destroyed the Earth. On the good side it sets you free to explore the vastness of the infinite. On the downside, it rather limits you as an observational humorist, when it comes to specifics, and while Douglas may not have been a novelist, he was definitely an observational humorist.

Still, I think there's another reason for the restoration of the Earth at the beginning of this book.

Like it or not, and when it came out some people did and some people didn't,
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
is a love story, and the novel puts an Earth back for there to be a love story on. Underneath all the glitter, Arthur and Fenchurch, and the unlikely circumstances of their meeting, their love and the travails thereof, is the true subject of the book.

And as we grow older our reading of books changes. As a young man, writing a book about Douglas Adams and
The
Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy,
I remember picking up on the awkwardness of chapter 25, and Douglas's rhetorical question as to whether or not Arthur Dent has . . .

           
“. . . 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. Reread
ing 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 recog
nized 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
.

D
on'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.

If you need an introduction before you start reading, here's one: This is the story of the Dog Star, Sirius, who is punished for a crime by being incarnated as a real dog, here on Earth. It's a detective story, and an adventure; it's a fantasy, and sometimes it's science fiction, and then it breaks all the rules by twining myth into the mix as well, and does it so well that you realize that really, there aren't any rules. It's an animal story for anyone who has ever had, or wanted, a pet—or a human story for any animal that has ever wanted a person. It's funny, and it's exciting and honest, and it has some sad bits too.

If you read it, you'll like it.

Trust me. Come back when you've read the book.

Welcome back.

Diana Wynne Jones wrote some of the best children's books that have ever been written. She started writing them with
Wilkins' Tooth
(a.k.a.
Witch's Business
) in 1973, and she continued writing them until she died in March 2011. She wrote about people, and she wrote about magic, and she wrote both of them with perception and imagination, with humor and clearness of vision.

We met in 1985, at a British Fantasy Convention, and we met before the convention started because we had both got there early, so I introduced myself, and I told her that I loved her books, and we were friends that quickly and that easily, and we stayed friends for over a quarter of a century. She was a very easy person to stay friends with, smart and funny and wise and always sensible and honest.

At her best, Diana's stories feel
real
. The people, with their follies and their dreams, feel as real as the magic does. In this book, she takes you inside the head of someone learning to be a dog, and it is real, because the people are real, and the cats are real, and the voice of the sunlight feels real as well.

Her books are not easy. They don't give everything up on first reading. If I am reading a novel by Diana Wynne Jones to myself, I expect to have to go back and reread bits to figure everything out. She expects you to be bright: she has given you all the pieces, and it is up to you to put them together.

Dogsbody
isn't easy. (It's not hard, either. But it's not easy.) It begins in the middle, at the end of a trial. Sirius, the Dog Star, is being tried in a court of his peers. It's five pages of science fiction, and just as we're getting used to it we are thrust, like Sirius, into the mind, what there is of it, of a newborn puppy, and we are in a dog's-eye-view look at the world.

The magic of
Dogsbody
is that it's a book about being a dog. And it's a book about being a star. It's a love story, and Diana Wynne Jones wrote very few love stories, and normally in those she wrote, the love was flawed and imperfect. But the love of this dog for this girl, and of this girl for her dog, is a perfect and unconditional thing, and we know this is true as
soon as we meet Kathleen. We learn about her life—the politics of the family she's in, and the greater politics that put her there.

Had Diana simply written a story about Kathleen and her dog from the dog's point of view, one that felt as right as this one does, that would have been an achievement, but she does so much more than that: she creates a whole cosmology of effulgences—creatures who inhabit stars, or, perhaps, who are stars. There is something called a Zoi that must be found before Sirius runs out of time. Then she adds the Wild Hunt, the hounds of Annwn, the Celtic underworld, to the tale, while never losing sight of the humanity at the heart of it.

I remember reading
Dogsbody
to my youngest daughter, almost ten years ago.

When I finished it, she didn't say very much. Then she looked at me and put her head on one side and said, “Daddy? Was that a happy end? Or a sad one?”

“Both,” I told her.

“Yes,” she said. “That was what I thought. I was really happy, but it made me want to cry.”

“Yeah,” I admitted. “Me too.”

It also made me try to figure out
why
and
how
Diana had made the ending work so well, triumphant and heartbreaking at the same time. I wanted to be able to do that.

Three weeks ago, I was in England, in Bristol, in a hospice, which is a place that provides care for people who are going to die. I sat beside Diana Wynne Jones's bed.

I felt very alone, and very helpless. Watching someone you care for die is hard.

And then I thought of this introduction. I had been looking forward to writing it, looking forward to talking to Diana about the book, and now it would never happen. I thought,
If Diana was a star, I wonder which star she would be,
and I imagined her shining in the night sky, and I was comforted.

Once, long ago, people thought that heroes were placed in the night sky, as stars or as constellations, after their death. Diana Wynne Jones was my hero: a brilliant writer who wrote satisfying book after satisfying book for generations of readers; the kind of writer whose work will be remembered and loved forever, and who was as funny and smart and honest and wise in person as she was on the page. She will shine for a long time to come.

(My friend Peter Nicholls, who was Diana's friend too, told me that he thought she could be Bellatrix, the Female Warrior, who is the star in the constellation Orion's left shoulder, and I think that is a fine suggestion. Diana was a warrior, even if her weapon was not a sword.)

This is one of her best books, although many of her books are good, and all of them are different in their own respective ways. I hope it made you happy and sad.

This is the introduction to
Dogsbody,
by Diana Wynne Jones, and was written in 2011.