The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy

A galaxy weirder, more wonderful and infinitely funnier.
Nearly thirty years ago, Douglas Adams' fellow radio-comedy writers couldn't resist spoofing the continuous repackaging of his Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: "And there'll be another edition of the television version of the book of the play of the radio series of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy of the License to Print Money at the same script next week," went one particularly thorny barb. That list has only grown — there followed a computer game, a comic book adaptation, three more radio series, an execrable film and now a new audiobook.

There's good reason for this continuous renewal: The Hitchhiker's Guide is a dazzling comic masterpiece, as fresh, original and giddily captivating today as it was in the 1970s. Though some purists might argue that the original radio scripts comprise the true Hitchhiker's canon, the novels are what give full range to Adams' prodigious gifts as a writer. Like the radio plays, the books are best when read aloud. A description like "The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't" — which knocked my legs out from under me twenty-five years ago and has lost none of its power to make me grin like an idiot — deserves to be listened to and savored.

Adams's friend, the writer, actor, comedian and sometime poet Stephen Fry, was the natural choice to record this version of The Guide. A superb and indefatigable narrator of audiobooks, Fry can make a listener's toes curl with pleasure with his resonant, versatile voice whether he's delivering a learned treatise on iambic hendecasyllabic meter, a classic Oscar Wilde tale or an excerpt from the London telephone book (this last is as yet unrecorded but presumably soon to be available). So it's surprising and a bit disappointing that Fry reads The Hitchhiker's Guide with the same stately cadence and hyperprecise diction that made his Harry Potter audiobooks suitable for small children and students of English as a second language. Whether it's reverence for the material that holds him back, or someone's direction to slow it down for the stupid Americans, this lentissimo delivery somewhat undercuts the mad energy and exuberant humor of The Guide and leaves one wishing Fry would loosen up and have a bit more fun.

Despite the drawbacks, Fry's recording is a worthy point of entry into a galaxy almost but not quite entirely unlike our own — weirder, more wonderful and infinitely funnier.