Things to hold on to are precious in Adams’ world. Just as his characters cling to their own sense-making objects – a towel, the phrase ‘Don’t Panic’, or a cup of tea – Adams gives us a Guide, for moments of disorientation and hopelessness. To use the Telegraph’s recent definition of a cult novel as ‘the sort of book that people carry around like a totem’, Hitchhiker’s Guide is a paradigm case.
Adams’ ironically named ‘Guide’ proves as arbitrary a thing to hold onto as anything else. Absurd and inexplicable, filled with the horror and humour of paradox, existence here is inescapably senseless. Reflecting on Earth throughout the galactic adventures, Adams notes the insanities of modern life: why do we need the instructions on a pack of toothpicks, detailing a technique which cavemen mastered 600,000 years ago? The most mundane areas of human behaviour are made to reveal the great delusions and assumptions we hold.
Equally, the grand and important is brought crashing down to the mundane. Adams’ jokes, and his story arcs, resolve themselves via anticlimax and surprising inversions. The series does not celebrate its heroes’ ability to overcome problems; Arthur Dent rarely wins his battles through any intentional action of his own. He is plucked from trouble, as he is deposited in it, by bizarre coincidence. Adams’ work is beyond traditional linear sci-fi narratives, with masterful intelligent life forms in control of their own fates. The most masterful intelligent life forms in Hitchhiker’s Guide, like the Ruler of the Universe, are figures of resignation.
Perhaps the emotional immediacy of this comes from how Adams makes an organising principle out of what existence feels like at its worst and most baffling of moments. His characters are repeatedly squashed by enormous frustrations – pointless cruelties of fate. They are not rescued by any divine system of justice, but by fluke.
He then gives us characters who shrug, and hold onto their towel. There is inspiration even in this conceptualisation of a random universe; we may not have the Answer (or even the Question), but we have something to keep us going. Adams’ vision is not bleak; it is always delivered with warmth, and there is companionship in the way he sees a universe we recognise. This is the comfort which the Guide gives us, and why it has been a ‘totem’ for 30 years and counting.
