Novel: The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul

Overview
Douglas Adams’s second Dirk Gently novel splices a comic detective story with Norse mythology, pitching a chronically underfunded “holistic” sleuth into a modern London where ancient gods survive by awkwardly adapting to the age of airports, advertising, and celebrity PR. The title evokes that bleak Sunday-afternoon drift when purpose feels out of reach, a mood the book both skewers and inhabits as it follows mysteries that begin as absurdities and resolve into a melancholy about belief, responsibility, and decline.

Plot
An American woman in London, Kate Schechter, arrives at Heathrow intending to fly to Oslo, only for the check-in desk to erupt in a freak “Act of God” explosion that leaves her injured, luggage vaporized, and fatefully entangled with a huge, furious stranger whose temper seems to summon weather. The stranger is Thor, gravely diminished by the modern world and tethered to a dubious arrangement with human handlers who have turned divine thunder into a marketable resource. Kate’s chance encounter with him pulls her into a crossfire of contracts, vendettas, and impossible phenomena.

Meanwhile, Dirk Gently, Svlad Cjelli to the tax authorities, stumbles into a locked-room case: a well-to-do man is discovered headless in his immaculate home under circumstances that refuse any sensible explanation. Dirk’s methods, which trust that everything is connected in ways reason cannot prearrange, draw him from legal offices and hospitals to draughty railway stations and genteel nursing homes, noting along the way curious signs: a watchful bird, a humming refrigerator that feels like a shrine, a trail of paperwork as binding as any spell.

As Dirk tracks the “Act of God” at Heathrow and the decapitation that shouldn’t be possible, the strands tighten around a ruthless media operator who has leveraged an ancient bargain with Odin, now passing in the world as a frail, courteous old man. Centuries ago, in the face of dwindling worship, Odin traded grandeur for endurance; in the late twentieth century that endurance has been monetized, parceling out storms, omens, and awe as publicity stunts. Thor, bridled by legalese he barely grasps, alternates between swagger and confusion, while Odin, tired and lucid, endures the humiliation of being managed.

Dirk and Kate’s paths converge at a hidden threshold to Asgard smuggled into London’s everyday fabric, where a surreal banquet reveals gods diminished, querulous, and vainly nostalgic. Recoveries and betrayals play out at human scale: a hammer lost and found, a signature that binds more surely than chains, a final reckoning in which the contract’s moral bankruptcy is exposed. The impossible corpse yields to an explanation only a holistic detective would chase, Heathrow’s “accident” turns out not to be accidental, and the divine household, having momentarily flared into relevance, gutters back toward absence.

Themes and Tone
Adams lampoons airline bureaucracy, legal chicanery, and tabloid culture while treating the gods’ plight with unexpectedly gentle pity. The joke is that modern systems have replaced mythology yet function like myth: capricious, ritualized, and hungry for sacrifice. Coincidences accumulate until they look like fate; paperwork behaves like sorcery; vending machines have personalities and grudges. Against this, Dirk’s offhand courage and Kate’s practical decency become forms of faith, not in gods but in unlikely connections and better choices.

Aftermath
The mysteries are solved, though few thank the solver. Contracts end, debts come due, and what remains is a Sunday dusk feeling: the awareness that grandeur has ebbed, that the world, for all its absurdity, is stitched together by fragile kindnesses and improbable links. Dirk leaves with a battered coat, uncollected fees, and the satisfaction that the universe, even at its most ridiculous, still adds up, just not the way anyone expects.