Paterson Joseph’s love letter to sci-fi legend Douglas Adams

Douglas Adams’s novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has been in my life in one form or another for nearly 40 years. I first heard the radio play when I was 19 and had been given the cassettes of the original cast album by my girlfriend. I hadn’t listened to tons of BBC Radio 4 up to that point as my parents had Radio 1 or 2 blaring in the background most days. (We switched to Radio London for the reggae and calypso on a Sunday, of course.)

Laying my family radio traditions aside – my girlfriend had decent taste – I dutifully put the cassette in my tape player (Yes, kids. That was how we shared stuff in the 1980s) at home as I went to bed that night. And I listened to it every night (no exaggeration) for four years. I can freely quote from huge chunks of it, even half a century later. Memorable stuff. And definitively life changing. 

Some of the precious cassettes were stolen – a tale for another time – and I refused to listen to the fragmented remnant again. I also refused (and continue to refuse) to watch any live-action version on the grounds that the images in my head from the audio version are perfect. I have that original cast recording now but, in the intervening years, the novel has been my comfort.

Adams’ life and work is greatly to be admired. His wit and erudition, plus his wonderful, unique sense of the absurdities of life, shine through everything he touched. His stand on the ecological damage humankind is inflicting on the planet, long before it became a fashionable topic of mainstream conversations, made him a prophet of sorts. 

His writing is packed with invention and such expert handling of grammar and the nuances of the English language that it educated me as I was being entertained. I learned from Adams’ work how flexible and malleable meaning can be, how context and character can make an innocuous sentence sound ominous or ridiculous. They’re invaluable lessons that have become a major component part of my writing style. Any author that can make you laugh and cry and learn in equal measure has to be a winner.

From his work I was introduced to words I had never heard before, ideas that seemed outlandish and absurd

I struggled at school for various reasons, but my love of words and language was undiminished by academic failure. I began avidly reading whatever I could lay my hands on at the age of 13. Books felt like feasts of learning to me then, as if I could imbibe the intelligence and insights of each author I took up. Shakespeare (untaught but read aloud in my bedroom), Oscar Wilde (romance and tragedy – perfect teen fodder), Guy de Maupassant (in translation then), PG Wodehouse and Langston Hughes (compare and contrast, please), John Galsworthy (wordy worrier), William Wordsworth (wizardly wordsmith), and even a smattering of the romantic, formulaic series of novels that made up the Mills and Boon collection. Quite eclectic, I’d say, if a little scattergun in my approach.

Of all the writers that I encountered in my teens, however, only Adams remains very obviously integrated into my writing style. From his work I was introduced to words I had never heard before, ideas that seemed outlandish and absurd but somehow cleverly aligned to actual events or current thinking. He satirised political thought, capitalism, class issues, traditional work practices and gender politics. And, since all his protagonists were ‘aliens’ of one kind or another, no community could be directly offended by his humorous take on customs and culture – however close to the bone he got with his piercing satire.

Never cruel, I think Adams would have been uncomfortable with the recent fashion for the comedy of cruelty, the kind that finds easy targets and lacks empathy for its victims. Douglas Adams was cleverer than that and managed to balance mockery of societal norms with a deep understanding of the absurd way human institutions are formed and sustain themselves, and how they often end in an attempt to control our thinking and actions. What he would have made of our deeply compromised privacy – where every transaction is documented through our credit cards – would have been extraordinarily useful to know.

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy radio play taught me how comedy works – Adam’s novel taught me how to add a ‘voice’ to my writing. I only wish he hadn’t passed away before I had a chance to thank him in person. Still, I have had the very great fortune to work with some of the actors on that original recording, and that feels like the next best thing.

Finally, on top of all that can be said about Douglas Adams’s work, his writing is funny as hell.

From Paterson, with grammatical gratitude… and literary love.

The Secret Diaries of Charles Ignatius Sancho is published by Dialogue and is available to buy from 6 October