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Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

The great Italian philosopher Benedetto Croce gained some notoriety in the early years of this century by arguing that literary genres were unimportant. The imaginative vision an author wished to communicate need not confine itself to fixed literary forms. Whether Croce succeeded in showing his thesis true for Dante and William Shakespeare, his principal subjects, is much disputed among literary critics. There can be little doubt, however, that Croce would have rejoiced had he been able to see Douglas Adams’ new book.

Although officially classed as a mystery, the book might with equal justice be tagged a work of science fiction or even a speculative cosmology. The story begins in conventional fashion with a young woman named Susan who has lost a cat, in pursuit of which she applies to Dirk Gently, a detective of friendly manner, who advances bizarre ideas in perfectly straightforward tones of voice. To him, ghosts are as normal as clients.

That the unusual, even by Gently’s hardly demanding standards, is about to take place will be apparent to the reader by the second chapter. In it, a mysterious being named Monk--either person, computer, or unknown force -- suffers an attack of amnesia; the exact nature of its delusions will later figure heavily in the tale.

The scene then shifts to a charmingly portrayed Cambridge college, which numbers among its faculty an eccentric professor named Urban Chronotis, who understandably prefers to be called by his nickname, Reg. Reg has achieved fame for a retentive memory of gargantuan dimensions, as well as for a stock of anecdotes unusual in their quantity even for an English academic.

It soon becomes evident that Reg’s knowledge has been acquired through nonnatural channels. He has access to a time machine and uses it to go back several centuries. As if this were not already enough of a challenge to common sense, he has succumbed to temptation and cheated. He is supposed only to view the past, not to interfere with the events that have already taken place, as to do so would play havoc with logic as well as time. On one occasion, though, Reg cannot restrain himself, and this figures importantly in the case of the missing cat, the story’s ostensible theme.

Further details of the plot would likely give away the solution. Suffice it to say that Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” a ghostly student, and a voyage in the time machine extending back to 4,000,000,000 B.C. form parts of the solution to the case.

The author’s whimsical sense of humor and his sense that the universe has many unexplored possibilities will arouse the interest of a wide readership.