Book Name : Dirk Gently 2 - The Long Dark Tea-Time of the soul
Author : Adams, Douglas
No. of Pages : 342
Summary : (Taken from
Wikipedia)
Dirk
Gently, who calls himself a "holistic detective", has
happened upon what he thinks is a rather comfortable situation. A wealthy man
in the record industryhas
retained him, spinning a story about being stalked by a seven-foot-tall,
green-eyed, scythe-wielding monster. Dirk
pretends to understand the man's ravings involving potatoes and a contract signed in
blood coming due; when in reality, Dirk is musing about what he might do if he
actually receives payment for his "services" – such as getting rid of
his refrigerator, which
is so filthy inside that it has become the centrepiece of a showdown between
himself and his cleaning woman. The seriousness of his client's claims becomes
clear when Dirk arrives several hours late for an appointment to find a swarm
of police around his client's estate. The aforementioned client is found in a
sealed and heavily barricaded room, his head neatly removed several feet from
his body and rotating on aturntable. While at
his recently deceased client’s house, he discovers that his client had a son.
However, after Dirk disconnects the television set the boy
had been watching, the boy promptly breaks Dirk’s nose.
Nearly
incapacitated by guilt, Dirk resolves to take his now-late client's wild claims
seriously. During his investigation, Gently encounters exploding airport
check-in counters, the gods of Norse mythology,
insulting horoscopes, a
sinister nursing home, a rhino phagic eagle, an I Ching calculator (to which
everything calculated above the value of 4 is apparently 'a suffusion of
yellow'), an omnipotent
being who gives his powers to a lawyer and an
advertising executive in exchange for clean linen, and an attractive American woman who gets angry when she
can't get pizza delivered in London.
Plot
§ The
central premise of the book is that gods are created by humans' necessity and
desire for them, and, once worshipped by man, don't disappear but remain on
earth forever. Because nobody worships them, many become destitute, like the
tramps whom Dirk witnesses entering Valhalla.
§ Odin
makes Thor accidentally transmogrify objects when he gets angry, in a bid to
delay him getting to Norway and finding the Draycotts' contract.
§ The
eagle that pursues Dirk and Thor is the transformed jet fighter that tries to
stop him from getting to Norway. Thor's inability to fly to Norway using his
hammer is why he needs to visit the airport at the opening of the novel.
§ Odin
makes contact with the Draycotts after seeing one of Cynthia Draycott's adverts
for a soft drink, which seemingly involve various gods promoting the drink; one
of these adverts is seen when Dirk confronts Anstey's son early in the book.
§ Odin,
like all the gods, is naive and quite literally unworldly; this is how the
Draycotts are able to take advantage of him.
§ One
of Dirk's chief characteristics in the novel is guilt—about the fridge and
about the death of Anstey, whom he should have protected. At the end of the
novel, Dirk's fridge generates a new god of Guilt; it is implied this stops Toe
Rag and the green monster from preventing Thor from finally retrieving the
contract in Norway.
§ The
gods' world exists in parallel with our own – where St Pancras railway station is Valhalla.
Note : This
book is in the epub format. you need sony reader for pc to be pre-installed in
your computer to read this book. you can download sony reader for pc software
from this link.(http://ebookstore.sony.com/download/)
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