A Hack's Mostly Harmless Attempt to Review Mostly Harmless

Anything that happens, happens. Anything that, in happening, causes something else to happen, causes something else to happen. Anything that, in happening, causes itself to happen again, happens again. It doesn't necessarily do it in chronological order, though.
- opening lines from Mostly Harmless

"Mostly Harmless" wasn't the first time I encountered Douglas Adams. I bought a dog-eared copy of his lesser-known work entitled "The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul" on a whim from a second-hand book dealer. It was an absurd detective story about forgotten gods and a Coke vending machine (don't ask). I didn't particularly care for the ending of "The Long Dark Tea-time of the Soul." I didn't understand it, for one. But his sentences amused me enough that when I saw "Mostly Harmless" in my local bookstore I grabbed it right away.

For the unhip, uncool, geeky Tom Clancy guzzlers out there unfamiliar with Douglas Adams, "Mostly Harmless" is the fifth in a trilogy (that's right, Book 5 of 3) of Hitchhiker books concerning, well, life, the universe and everything. The hilarious, Monty Python-esque books in the series are (1) The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, (2) The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, (3) Life, the Universe, and Everything, (4) So Long and Thanks for the Fish, and lastly, (5) Mostly Harmless.

The series follows the misadventures of Arthur Dent who managed to escape from Earth, thanks to his friend and alien journalist Ford Prefect, before it was blown to bits by a race of ugly construction workers called Vogons to make way for a hyperspace bypass. For most of the "Hitchhiker" series, Arthur goes swishing back and forth through space, finds himself stranded on Earth millions of years in the past, spends about five years there, goes mad, goes back to the present, gets thrown back into space again, goes to a parallel Earth, meets someone, falls in love, and loses that someone in a misunderstanding about space/time continuum. "Mostly Harmless" finds Dent trying to make sense of his disheartening fate. He goes looking for a planet he can call his Earth, instead he crash lands on a remote and Bob-fearing one. But it's alright. He adapts. So just when he's finally starting to enjoy life, life throws him a curveball in the form of a daughter he didn't know he had (whose conception he didn't even perform) and his supposed friend - the galaxy's numero uno scuzzball, Ford Prefect - had gone through a lot of trouble to ensure all hell breaks loose.

But the fun doesn't stop there. Apparently, a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings built a supercomputer called Deep Thought designed to calculate the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. After millions of years of computations, Deep Thought came up with the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The answer was brief. It was a disappointment. It was a great big letdown, in fact. When the pan-dimensional beings complained, Deep Thought said all it was tasked to do was come up with an answer. Maybe if they understood the question, the answer would make sense. So, they created another computer, more powerful than the first one, to come up with the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe and Everything. The computer was Earth. After millions of years of processing and computing, just before the crucial "read-out", the Vogons destroy the Earth. All that and not exactly in chronological order either.

Where did this leave Arthur Dent? The hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings believed Dent may hold in his head the Ultimate Question. Which goes to show that even hyperintelligent beings don't think well at times.

I read somewhere that "The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy" became such a phenomenon that people conceptualized a philosophy around the book's premise. Some people even formed a religion based on the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. If you ask me, these people are in dire need of sex. Still, I can appreciate their enthusiasm.

You cannot read one book, really, and not want to read the rest. Adams is addictive, to say the least. An irreverent master of wit, satire and storytelling. Before Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett were fashionable, there was Adams.

A book, if it's the right kind of book, at the right moment, can change the world in a heartbeat. Or a life. But what was it in the book that moved me so? If all it did was introduce me to Adams' brilliance or make me laugh out loud, I would probably still thought of "Mostly Harmless" as my favorite book and the Hitchhiker series as one of my all-time favorite stories. Adams' one-two assault on the written word was uncanny and unparalleled. Only Adams could write like Adams. His sentences cut with such sharpness, such precision, that you do not even realize you were cut until you bleed.

But it was more than that really. I've read many books. Before "Mostly Harmless", though, I've always kept them at arm's length. I liked the colors they painted in my mind's eye. I loved it when I get lost in uncharted worlds, with characters that I could believe were my friends. But that was the extent of my relationship with them. They were friends but they weren't me.

How do I say it without sounding like such a cliché? Arthur Dent spoke to me. I was Arthur Dent. Completely clueless as to what was happening around him. When Arthur was "asking the universe to stop doing whatever it was that it was doing to him", I was there asking with him. No. That's inaccurate. It was me asking the universe to stop doing whatever it was that it was doing to me.

A memory: It was May 11, 2001 (I checked the Internet for the precise date, just to be sure).

I was then working for a local movie channel, on a deadline, writing a forgettable copy for a forgettable plug of a forgettable movie I had not, surprisingly, forgotten. The movie was "Halik ng Bampira" starring Anjanette Abayari. Funny how you remember these details.
An officemate came up to me and said matter-of-factly, "Did you know that Douglas Adams is dead?"

What I remember mostly was the thump! of realization. But not right away. It took a while for the thump! to happen because as my officemate spoke the words, the words swam around the room first before entering my ears, before pressing the ON switch in my head. The bright sky darkened and a thunderclap reverberated. (It's true that it may not have happened the way I describe it here but this is my memory after all and if I want thunderclaps, I will have thunderclaps!)

I thought, he couldn't just die up on me like that! I had been anxiously waiting for a full year then for Adams' supposed third Dirk Gently book, "The Salmon of Doubt". What an irresponsible thing to do, die when you're meant to be finishing a novel!

I checked the Internet, hoping this was just one of those April Fools' Day jokes. But it wasn't April 1. And it was no joke. He was a few months shy of his fiftieth year.

A long, long time ago, when Princess Diana died, I laughed my sanctimonious laugh at all those people who cried their petty tears. I didn't understand how you could feel that the loss of someone, however special or revered, someone whom you've never met could mean your loss too.

Then…

Well... Seeing that the news of Adams' death was not exaggerated, I was silent for a long time, not really knowing how to absorb everything. It's not every day that your hero dies.

And there was loss. Not imagined or intellectualized or romanticized. A real loss. A hole as big as the world, one that couldn't be filled by simply rummaging through the bargain bin hoping to find a replacement author. The world seemed dimmer somehow. Less color. More grey.

When I was looking for a voice to call my own, Adams' was the voice I wanted to emulate. Even after years of consciously trying to "unwrite" his writing in my head, I still find myself unconsciously or subconsciously writing in his style. Even this sad little number resonates with his influence.

A book, if it's the right book…

And it was that one book - "Mostly Harmless" that started it all.

Perhaps this is the reason why many people either form a philosophy or religion about it. It's too unbearable to think that your life could be changed drastically by a funny book of absurd rantings by a Brit who looked like Goofy. But there you go.

I feel sad writing this down, not because I remember how wussy or fanboyish I had been - still am I suppose - although there was that. I fear I had missed my chance to convince you to go out there and look for Adams' masterpiece. I don't think I've given the Hitchhiker series justice. If I'm half the writer I wished I were, perhaps I could have done a better job. I wanted to describe it more properly, more eloquently, convince you folks that it's worth a look, make you understand that it's important for you to know the Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. And indeed, the question.

Instead, I reminisce about dead authors. Oh well.

But then again... to describe it in detail, to dissect and deconstruct would also be injustice. How would you intellectualize a joke? Why should you anyway?

So, what's the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything? What was the question? It's all in the Hitchhiker books, waiting for you to read it and get the joke.