Having purchased Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker novels as a full set of five numbered paperbacks, I got a little confused on reading some reviews of book 3 ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ on Amazon, where reviewers kept discussing the plot as a ‘love story’ in which Arthur Dent falls in love with a character called Fenchurch, because on having read said novel it turned out to be nothing of the sort.
Now that I have continued on to book 4, ‘So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish’ which actually does contain the love story, I finally realise that for some rather odd reason, Amazon has got rather mixed-up and attached the exact same reviews to both novels 3 and 4. I’m just glad to know that I haven’t lost touch with reality, the resulting confusion was properly justified. Thanks Amazon!
Yes, anyway moving on…
Volume 4 in the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’s trilogy of five parts is ‘So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish’, in which back on a now non-demolished Earth, Arthur Dent falls in love.
Surprisingly, ‘So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish’ is actually one of the most enjoyable of the Hitchhiker novels so far. It has a clear cut storyline and unlike the majority of Douglas Adams’ other works, actually makes quite a lot of sense. Maybe it’s because a love story, regardless of the circumstances, is a plot which almost everyone can feasibly relate to, or just simply that this is the first novel which Douglas actually wrote from scratch, as a novel, rather than an adaptation of a TV or radio script. Either way, with a rating of 4 out of 5 stars, I feel like ‘So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish’ is a successfully, well-written tale, well worth reading.
See also:
Vol 1 – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Vol 2 – The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Vol 3 – Life, the Universe and Everything
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