The electric monk

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Douglas Adams

The Electric Monk - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency is a novel by the English writer Douglas Adams , first published in 1987 under the original title Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency . Douglas Adams himself described the book as a "ghost-horror-who-is-the-perpetrator-time machine-romances-comedy-musical-epic".

The continuation of the book is The Long Dark Five O'clock Tea of ​​the Soul . A third part was in the works that Adams could not finish before his death in 2001. Fragments of this work were published in the estate volume Lachs im Doubt .

action

The novel breaks down into many storylines that seem to have nothing to do with each other at first. Only gradually are the connections between them uncovered and in the end it becomes apparent that every subplot was necessary for the overall logic of the plot. Neither will the relative chronology of the events described below become apparent to the reader until the middle of the narrative.

Richard MacDuff attends the annual banquet at his former college, St. Cedds, at the invitation of his senior college tutor, Professor "Reg" Chronotis. Reg is acting a little stranger than usual, apparently trying to discuss something with Richard, but it never really comes to that. It turns out that the sudden noise above Reg's room was caused by a horse in the bathroom. For some unknown reason, this fact greatly eases Reg. Richard suddenly remembers the promise he made to his girlfriend Susan that they would do something special together tonight.

On a distant planet, a humanoid robot called an Electric Monk works its way through a series of nonsensical beliefs. His only job is to believe things (so as to save other people the trouble of doing it themselves), but disruption has made his belief system increasingly prone to failure. Cast out of civilization with a horse as a companion, he currently believes that his surroundings are pale pink and that an ordinary white door leads into a strange new world.

Gordon Way, a businessman, is driving towards his cottage on a country lane, talking on his sister's answering machine. When he stops to close the trunk of his car, he is shot. However, his mind wonders why it still exists and what to do now.

Michael Milton-Innerwoakes (in the original: Michael Wenton-Weakes) always got everything he wanted from his wealthy father. But after the old man's death, Michael's mother turned out to be a much more conscientious manager of the family-run newspaper empire than her last husband had ever been. The spoiled young man finds that his expensive “toys”, including his beloved money-guzzling magazine, are suddenly stolen from him. Michael is maddened by this loss.

The turbulent past of Svlad Cjelli, one of Richard McDuff's old classmates, also includes a number of very insignificant ripoffs. In college, however, an attempt to get free drinks and meals from fellow students in an illegal manner got a little out of control and led to the arrest of Cjelli. Under the new name Dirk Gently , he is now the owner and sole investigator of a detective agency that claims to be exploiting the fundamental interdependence of all things to solve any case. While he produces any number of absurd arguments for his inflated expense reports, he is also hugely successful at discovering the truth - however improbable it may be.

Svlad extorts a meeting with Richard when he watches Richard break into his girlfriend's apartment. Richard tries to delete a bad message on his girlfriend's answering machine. At the meeting, Svlad hypnotizes Richard in order to discover Richard's real intentions for the break-in. Richard was possessed by a "ghost" at this point.

This spirit is the last "survivor" of an accident involving aliens who wanted to colonize the earth in prehistoric times. The ghost tries to gain access to a time machine owned by Reg. Towards the end of the book, the spirit (in the body of Michael), Reg, Svlad and Richard all come together in the space of the time machine. The ghost tries to convince the others that it just wants to change the passage of time in order to save its shipmates. Just as the latter is on the way to changing history, the others notice that the spirit and its comrades want to colonize the earth and prevent the existence of humanity.

Richard and his friends prevent this development in a bizarre way that is typical for Adam: They prevent the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798 from writing his poem Kubla Khan , which he wrote under the influence of the spirit. This is how humanity will eventually be saved. The time machine is then unusable. There are no further dangers to be feared.

reception

The book received mixed reviews. It was compared everywhere with the hitchhiker's novels , with some voices claiming that the book lacked the high-pitched gags it contained. Other sites praised the book, calling it better and more mature than the hitchhiker's guide . All the reviews have in common a rather ambivalent impression: “Only towards the end do you get the feeling that Adams either didn't really feel like it anymore or, as with every episode of the HHGG , was simply in dire need of time with regard to the deadline. The many threads are dissolved (almost all), but in such a quick way that does not fit the rest of the novel. "

Leitmotif

The central motif of the novel is the fundamental connectedness of all things. Many details may seem redundant at first, but afterwards they turn out to be integral parts of the storyline. The chaos theory is therefore a suitable context for this novel. The concept of holism is referred to in the subtitle or original title of the novel. There are also guest appearances from quantum mechanics in the novel, such as the EPR effect or Schrödinger's cat .

Adaptations

On January 5, 1992, Dirk Gently, Richard MacDuff, Dirk's secretary and the Electric Monk appeared in the Douglas Adams episode of the Independent Television network's British art documentary series The South Bank Show . Michael Bywater played Dirk Gently, Paul Shearer played both MacDuff and the Electric Monk. The book was adapted as a play with the name Dirk .

In 2007 BBC Radio 4 started an 18-part radio play series of 30-minute episodes each from all Dirk Gently books, which even included the unfinished version of his last book and was broadcast in three seasons of six episodes each from October 3, 2007.

In December 2010 , BBC Four launched a TV series titled Dirk Gently based on the events of The Electric Monk . After the one-hour pilot episode , more episodes were announced and three more one-hour episodes were filmed. Despite good reviews and audience numbers, the series - apparently for financial reasons - was not continued.

With Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency , a total of eighteen-part series was produced from 2016 to 2017, the title character of which is loosely based on that of the book, but otherwise has nothing in common with the plot of the original. Samuel Barnett and Elijah Wood can be seen in leading roles . In January 2018, the second and final season of the series appeared, which can be seen on Netflix in the DACH countries.

literature

  • Douglas Adams: The Electric Monk. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency , Heyne (2001) - ISBN 3453199081 (paperback)
  • Douglas Adams: The Electric Monk. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency , Rogner & Bernhard (1992) - ISBN 3807702261 (hardcover)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Book Review: The Electric Monk: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams ( Memento from February 23, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency . In: Magill Book Reviews . May 1, 1990, ISSN  0890-7722 .
  3. ↑ Novels SciFi - Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: Long dark five o'clock tea of ​​the soul. January 20, 2008, accessed March 6, 2019 .
  4. ^ The South Bank Show: Full Cast & Crew. IMDb , accessed March 6, 2019 .
  5. ↑ Douglas Adams' Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency opens for business on Radio 4. BBC , July 13, 2007, accessed on March 6, 2019 .
  6. ↑ Stephen Mangan to star as detective Dirk Gently. BBC, October 6, 2010, accessed March 6, 2019 .
  7. ↑ Jason Deans: Dirk Gently to return to BBC4. The Guardian , March 31, 2011, accessed March 6, 2019 .
  8. ↑ Arthur A .: None. Season 3: "Dirk Gently's holistic detective agency" discontinued after two seasons. In: Filmfutter.com. December 19, 2017, accessed March 6, 2019 .