Life and death after Douglas Adams

(Originally published on 3rd August 2007)

I went to my first book launch in a few weeks last Thursday, for a magical first novel called Gods Behaving Badly, in which the gods of ancient Greece are living in undignified squalor in a shabby terraced house in Islington. Some of the gods try to apply their deific skills top the modern world: Artemis is a professional dog walker and her brother Apollo a TV psychic. But their modern lives are mundane and largely impotent; it takes the appearance of the doughty Alice, their cleaner, to bring some excitement and purpose back to their eternal existences.

The author, Marie Phillips is, wonderfully, gloriously, a former bookseller; she proffered the opening chapters of her manuscript to a sales rep, Peter Fry, who took it straight to Dan Franklin, grand fromage at Jonathan Cape. He read it, immediately phoned her to ask for the rest and made her an offer the next day.

It's the first genuinely funny new novel I've read for longer than I can remember: it made me laugh out loud on the tube, which undoubtedly had me fixed in the withering yet oddly stoic glare of my carriage-mates. What makes it stand out is the dialogue, a trick which evades most authors, who either end up with characters sounding like they've spent their entire lives under the direction of Noel Coward or else spouting some sort of ersatz street-talk which has been researched by means of sitting on the top deck of a bus at the end of the school day.

Essentially, she has Douglas Adams' ear for comic dialogue. (I mentioned this to her at the launch and she delightedly pointed out that the appearance of one of the lead characters in a dressing gown was in homage to dearly departed Douglas.) The opening scene, where Artemis comforts a tree which had been an Australian accountant called Kate until she rashly declined a particularly blunt proposition from Apollo, is the spirit of the book in microcosm. When Artemis describes Kate's new appearance to her, she takes comfort in her foliage.

"Are you sure I haven't gone mad?"

"I'm sure," said Artemis. "You're a tree. A eucalytpus. Subgenus of mallee. Variegated leaves."

"Oh," said the tree.

"Sorry," said Artemis.

"But with variegated leaves?"

"Yes," said Artemis. "Green and yellow."

The tree seemed pleased. "Oh well, at least there's that to be grateful for," it said.

"That's the spirit," Artemis reassured it.

In an appearance on Radio4's Bookclub (or something similar) some years ago, Douglas Adams asserted that the biggest influence of his writing style had been A A Milne. It instantly made sense. He used the same, blunt verbless sentences, with rambling pomposities thrown in as the plot and characters demanded. He cast sentences so that the eye is drawn to the absurd. He even capitalised for emphasis. All in all, there's a certain flow to it, one that works well when spoken out loud but also has the internal poetic rhythm that is the gift of the most stylish of prose writers, the staccato combined with the mellifluous. And I think Marie Phillips has that too.

Athena's wisdom is now lost in the hubbub of accountants' jargon and marketing gibberish; Dionysus spends time concocting and field-testing his revoltingly potent home-brew; Hephaestus is the epitome of the amateur DIY enthusiast. The book is appreciative enough of the mythos from which its immortal cast comes to make it a knowingly satisfying book for the lay classicist. But it also updates the stories delightfully: who could fail to be tickled by the notion that the Angel tube station is the gateway to the Underworld? Certainly not me, having arrived for the launch via that station in heat in more conducive to cake baking and then travelled up those escalators so long that they look as if they've been filched from the set of A Matter of Life and Death, accompanied by the less than celestial strains of a busker murdering Baker Street on an oboe (although eight out of ten for effort there).

Anyway, Gods Behaving Badly is out now and will be a book I shall suggest at every vaguely appropriate opportunity to our customers. So when you get a copy for Christmas from that distant and eccentric relative who has heretofore alternated between getting you bilious and grossly oversized knitwear and gift sets of rather manky cosmetics from Superdrug then you may well have me to thank for the hours of entertainment and the excuse to absent yourself from the post-prandial charades and ceremonial watching of the Harry Potter film.

Speaking of Douglas Adams, in the news today was the sorrowful conclusion that the baiji, or Yangtze river dolphin, is now believed to be extinct. The connection with Adams is that the baiji was one of the animals he sought out with naturalist Mark Cawardine in their book on endangered species of the world, Last Chance To See, published in 1990. At the time of his visit, the Chinese government had set up an ambitious project to preserve the dolphins' habitat, but the demands of industry have been, it would seem inevitably in a rapidly expanding economy, impossible to ignore. Having advanced all the usual arguments in favour of promoting biodiversity, Adams concluded that there was one more reason to preserve curious evolutionary culs-de-sac such as the kakapo and the Komodo dragon: "the world would be a colder, darker, lonelier place without them". Today, of course, we know he's right.

To compound this note of loss and regret, I'll conclude with a rather sad little quote from the editor of The Dandy, Craig Graham, announcing a relaunch of the 70 year-old comic as Dandy Xtreme.

"Following extensive research, we discovered The Dandy readers were struggling to schedule a weekly comic into their hectic lives. They just didn't have enough time. They're too busy gaming, surfing the net or watching TV, movies and DVDs."