A Cosmic Detour With ‘Hitchhiker’ Author

In Chapter One, a check-in counter at London’s Heathrow Airport explodes inexplicably, rocketing up through the roof in a ball of flame.

Chapter Two reveals the explosion resulted from a “non-linear, catastrophic structural exasperation, or, to put it another way . . . the check-in desk had just got ‘fundamentally fed up with being where it was.’ ”

At this point readers are likely to put down “The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul” for a moment and let the questions squabbling in their mind have their say. Such as: Why is Douglas Adams, the enormously popular author of the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” series, so down-to-earth in his new--and already best-selling--novel?

The four-part Hitchhiker trilogy (get a clue! things don’t always add up according to earthling expectations) chronicles the adventures of Arthur Dent, whose greatest concern was the bulldozer about to level his home in England to make way for a new highway. Then he learned the planet itself was to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic expressway, leaving Dent to thumb his way through the cosmos armed only with “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

But all this is to digress, a technique that serves Adams better than it does the mission of shedding light on the author who blasted through town last week on a light-speed publicity tour.

A Lunatic Logic

So it was that Adams was presented with a question that might seem out of context but really isn’t if one is properly immersed in the lunatic logic that propels his work.

“How smart are you?”

“How smart am I?” the usually erudite Brit repeated, wobbling for the first time in his breakfast ballet of bons mots gracefully arranged between bites of eggs Benedict.

“Um,” he said. “Um.”

“I would say that I have a mind that is quite adept at making connections between things,” he said, finally getting back into sync with his fork. “I think the imaginative leaps that I suppose I make have become something of a trademark and tend to be based on the recognition that the things you leap between are fundamentally similar to each other.”

Adams is sufficiently large that he once worked as a bodyguard. But it’s hard to imagine whom he intimidated. He has a gentle manner and pleasant face adorned with a nose that somehow brings to mind the enormous eagles continually swooping down on the characters in his latest work.

Adams first began infiltrating the minds of his fellow Britons in 1978, when BBC radio produced his series “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

He later turned that into the book, and wrote three sequels, the latter two of which--”Life, the Universe and Everything” and “So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish”--quickly hit best-seller lists on both sides of the Atlantic, as did his next novel, “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.”

Meantime, the author became a cottage industry, spinning his oddball ideas off into a Public Broadcasting System television series, record albums and interactive video games.

An Adams cult quickly blossomed, comprised mainly of science fiction and fantasy buffs. They apparently were attracted to his infusion of humor into the often humorless genres and the way his work bounds over big ideas and takes weird hops through exotic intellectual turf.

The satire and disjointed, seat-of-the-pants philosophy continues in “Tea-Time,” a sequel to “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency.”

“This phrase I keep putting in Dirk Gently’s mouth, about ‘the fundamental interconnectedness of all things,’ I think I actually find some truth in it,” Adams said.

And so it is that the plot of “Tea Time” ricochets along from one flimsy connection to the next. Leading the way is its quasi-philosophical non-hero, a bumbling private detective who is so deeply engaged in a battle of wits with his housekeeper (over who should clean the refrigerator) that he forgets a life-or-death appointment with a client.

When he finally arrives, “Most of his client . . . seemed generally to be casual and relaxed, with his legs crossed and a half-finished cup of coffee on the small table beside him. Distressingly, though, his head was sitting on the hi-fi turntable.”

The decapitated client, of course, is connected to the airline counter explosion, which turns out to be “an Act of God.” (“Nice one, God,” a character mutters.)

Ideas From All Directions

And when the god responsible turns out to be the Norse deity Thor--who’s in a tiff because his father Odin sold his soul to a yuppie advertising executive--that’s connected, too. Ideas, both impossible and mundane, come to Adams from all directions. “I suppose, I sort of think a lot,” he said.

He got Hitchhiker’s title, the well-worn story goes, when on holiday from Cambridge University, where he was studying English literature. Lying in a field near Innsbruck with “The Hitchhikers Guide to Europe” in hand, he gazed at the stars and thought: “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

“I think that’s what happened, but I only have my own word for it,” Adams said.

Likewise, the title “Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency” just popped into his head one day. “I came across it a year or two later and said to myself, ‘I wonder what this means?’

“There are things that strike you in the middle of nowhere,” Adams said. “You just hope you have a piece of paper with you.”

But scraps of paper tend to get lost. “So I find myself arming myself with all kinds of ways of taking notes.”

“Like this.” He pulled a miniature computer from one pocket of his sports coat.

“And this,” he said, extracting a microcassette recorder from another pocket.

An Odd Sort of Sense

Patched together, the ideas make an odd sort of sense, like bits from a Monty Python show--a program Adams never wrote for, contrary to popular myth. But perhaps because of the Pythonesque, rock ‘n’ roll edge to his work, Adams--who turned 37 last Saturday--is often linked to the era of flower power.

“I suppose I am a child of the ‘60s, with all the things both good and bad that that suggests. And, yes, I still listen to Dylan records,” he said, adding, though, that Elvis Costello is “the greatest musician that English rock music has produced, and I say that as an inveterate Beatles fan.”

In his hotel room, he slips Mozart into his portable CD player and hums along contentedly. Although he has settled nicely into what he sees as a moderately “rich and famous” life, Adams is less than enchanted with his quasi-pop star image.

“I tend to resent it a little bit when someone makes too much of me . . . it’s a worrying thing for a grown-up person to have fans, isn’t it?”

On the other hand, he is absolutely delighted to pop open “Tea Time” and read favorite passages aloud, especially relishing those that are “completely silly.”

As Adams writes in “Tea Time,” the god Odin has come to reside in a rest home. Among the other patients is a man who speaks each and every word Dustin Hoffman says just before the actor says it, no matter where the actor is.

There is also a woman who channels the thoughts of physicists Einstein, Planck and Heisenberg, while orderlies try to piece together the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics.

The ‘Theory of Everything’

This is a subject that fascinates Adams, who said, “These are very exciting times. I think we might well be arriving at what’s known as the Theory of Everything.”

Adams is particularly fascinated with Stephen Hawking, the wheelchair-bound British astrophysicist, whom he finds more interesting and unusual than most of his own fictional characters.

“The idea that this brain is stuffed inside this tiny crumpled body. . . . It’s fantastic that he’s here, live, among us, because he stands the best chance of anybody so far of actually coming up with the theory that unravels the fundamental nature of the universe.”

Adams is finding much to exhilarate him in reality these days. Last July, he went to Madagascar on assignment for a British magazine, to find and write about a nearly extinct lemur called the aye-aye. He encountered facts worthy of Douglas Adams’ fiction.

“Lemurs were once the dominant primate in the whole world,” he said. Then, after Madagascar split away from what is now the continent of Africa millions of years ago, monkeys arrived on the scene.

“The monkeys were much brighter, much more ambitious than the lemurs and competed successfully for the same habitat. So the lemurs have actually died out everywhere in the world other than Madagascar,” he said.

The trip “turned out to be one of the most extraordinary and revelatory experiences I’ve ever been through,” Adams said. “It revealed that there’s a whole world out there I don’t know anything about. I thought, this is absolutely wonderful! I should do more of this!”

BBC Radio Series

He has. The article evolved into an assignment to write a multipart radio series for the BBC and a nonfiction book about his search for strange animals on the verge of extinction.

So far he and his zoologist partner have made expeditions into the wilds of New Zealand, Chile, Thailand, Zaire and Indonesia, among other places. After his current book tour, they’re off to the Amazon in search of the endangered manatee (sea cow).

Even with its Norse gods and exploding check-in counters, Adams’ latest book may be his least fantastic. His next novel--after the nonfiction book--may be downright mainstream, he said.

For one thing, he thinks he will try “to suppress the need that I sometimes suffer from, which is . . . to instantly and duck for cover under the nearest joke,” whenever his writing leads to something serious.

“I think I might like to take on a few issues head-on. Not necessarily the state of the world, but relationships . . . that kind of stuff.”

“I think I might finally be beginning to get very tickled with real life.”