Above: all six foot five of Douglas Adams, flanked by the number he made famous

Thirty years. Gosh but the time’s flown by. Thirty years this October since the first of Douglas Adams’s five-book Hitchhiker’s Guide “trilogy” first appeared. Now, to mark the anniversary, there’s another one coming out, even though he has been dead for more than eight years. But publishing is a business, and books are product, and so this one has been written by Eoin Colfer—best known as the creator of the Artemis Fowl series—under the title And Another Thing (Michael Joseph).

It will do well. Some will buy it because they like Eoin Colfer’s other stuff. Some people will buy it because they are Hitchhiker fans and will yearn to love it and possibly succeed. Others will buy it because they are Hitchhiker fans and will yearn to really hate it and will almost certainly succeed. Some will think the idea is pure commercial genius. Some will think it venal and grotesque. Some will think it perpetuates the memory of Douglas Adams, others that it is an insult. Nobody’s opinions will make the slightest bit of difference. And nobody, in these hard times, will think a jot the less of Colfer for taking on the project. Any of us would have done the same.

Actually, some of us, to a certain extent, have done the same already. Some of us, as well as writing one of Adams’s computer games, trying but failing to write another, half-writing a third, and acting as emergency obstetrician on one of the novels, also possess a parallel manuscript of Mostly Harmless, the fifth and until now the last volume of the Hitchhiker trilogy. Probably the University of Somewhere In America would pay $$$ for the typescript, so I ought to dig it out.

Some of us sat downstairs in Islington with Douglas Adams’s editor, the saintly and incomparable Sue Freestone, typing out chapter after chapter of Mostly Harmless and sending it upstairs via email to where Douglas sat. There would be a from his computer, followed by cries of rage and alarm and “But that’s not what bloody happens,” followed by furious adversarial typing until Douglas had dismantled and reassembled it into something he liked—or, to be accurate, hated marginally less—at which point a glum silence would fall until some of us started typing again at our end to get ready for the next and gorilla noises from upstairs.

What really perplexes some of us is that the only way Adams could be persuaded to write Mostly Harmless at all was if it could be guaranteed that he could never, ever be called upon to write another Hitchhiker book ever again, not ever. He had had enough. So some of us—let me be straight with you; what I actually mean is “I”—sat down and worked out a plot which ended in the destruction of not only this Earth but of all possible Earths, as well as all possible Zaphods, Ford Prefects, Trillians and anyone else whom Douglas hadn’t mopped up in his previous search-and-destroy forays into the Hitchhiker diegesis. It wasn’t a good plot. It was unnecessarily complicated. The dénouement rested on a bad pun. But the idea was to make any further sequel impossible. And then, just to make sure, Douglas died.

A couple of years ago, I started writing a book about male friendship, partly triggered by the death of two close friends in the space of a few weeks in 2001. One was Douglas. The other was the journalist and broadcaster John Diamond.

John died slowly and, if you like, publicly, charting his cancer in the Times and, later, in his book C: Because Cowards Get Cancer Too. During the drawn-out time when the cancer was killing him, I became closer to this man I’d always rather loved. Douglas, conversely, died suddenly in the gym. For a couple of years before that, we had been estranged after a silly but significant row over work. We had theoretically made up with the manly hug (in a horrible irony, at John Diamond’s last midsummer party) but hadn’t had the ritual drunken dinner called for by the rites of passage of emotionally inarticulate English men.

After these two deaths, I began to think about friendship between men. Women say we can’t do it, because of that very same emotional inarticulacy. My first starting point was: women are wrong. We may be emotionally inarticulate but that doesn’t mean we don’t have emotions, nor that we don’t communicate them. We just do it differently. Look at a group of women talking: they’re looking at each other. Look at a group of men talking: they’re all looking at something else—a car, a woman, an interesting 19th-century shaving brush.

• Share
•  Subscribe to post comments