"[H]e had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford to have is a sense of proportion." -- The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
Rereading Douglas Adams for the first time since I was a kid when I was mostly amused if not exactly wowed, I see his work from a different angle. It must have been that Adams did not have a talent for certain writerly crafts, so that I preferred comedic narratives by Robert Sheckley. But Adams was brilliant at other, uncommon narrative delights.
This is a case in point. He stitches together different anecdotes, some brief, some elaborate, woven as characters move from point A to point B. I don't want to spoil it for those who hate spoilers, so skip the next paragraph if you don't want this tiny moment ruined.
An elaborate metaphor is slowly built up and executed, metaphorically and literally, having to do with a device that contains the entire universe in a tiny thing--say, a fairy cake--so that when one experiences it, one is annihilated. However, one character manages to survive where everyone else died. He exits, worldview confirmed, eating the cake.
Take the following metaphor he sets up as being the place where this unhappy device was placed:
“Many years ago this was a thriving, happy planet—people, cities, shops, a normal world. Except that on the high streets of these cities there were slightly more shoe shops than one might have thought necessary. And slowly, insidiously, the numbers of these shoe shops were increasing. It’s a well-known economic phenomenon but tragic to see it in operation, for the more shoe shops there were, the more shoes they had to make and the worse and more unwearable they became. And the worse they were to wear, the more people had to buy to keep themselves shod, and the more the shops proliferated, until the whole economy of the place passed what I believe is termed the Shoe Event Horizon, and it became no longer economically possible to build anything other than shoe shops. Result—collapse, ruin and famine. Most of the population died out. Those few who had the right kind of genetic instability mutated into birds—you’ve seen one of them—who cursed their feet, cursed the ground and vowed that none should walk on it again, Unhappy lot. Come, I must take you to the Vortex.”
We think, "Ah, ha! That's why this device was created on this planet!"
But Adams pulls the rug out from under us as it was built elsewhere and placed on the planet because it was empty. That doesn't mean the anecdotes aren't connected, but he craftily shifts these anecdotes around. It's a game of three-card monte, where the cards or anecdotes are constantly shuffled around to keep you on your toes.
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