Has he lost it?
I'm going to be a little more harsh on this one, I accidently got out of order and didn't read the one before it, so that might explain why I have a few problems with it. I just read and read and felt very lost.. in a world of no plot. And how everything kept working out was just confusing as is. I really disliked the ending.. how things happened here and there.. and just happen. Really, I thought this the worst...
Great series ends with a dud
Probably the worst of the series. It was quirky but never evoked more than a chuckle. It was also more confusing than the other books. So the combination of not that funny and confusing didn't work out so well. I am glad to have finally finished a series I started more than 20 years ago but not sure I really needed to read this one.
At least one of the other reviewers mentioned that the narrator wasn't that great but liked him a lot.
Mostly satisfying
The unfortunately final entry in the Hitchhiker's Guide series is also perhaps the best.
There are some grounds for complaint. Adams' summarily writing out Fenchurch was disappointing, though necessary to make this story work. And the ending is decidedly bleak--yes, even worse than when Arthur and Ford were stranded on prehistoric Earth at the end of book two. There is some indication that Adams wouldn't have left the series ending this way had his life not been tragically cut short, but now we'll never know.
However, despite the occasionally dark tone, Adams' trademark zany humor runs throughout to help counterbalance it, and the plotting here nicely resolves threads introduced in several earlier entries in surprising ways. And as with Arthur's relationship with Fenchurch in the previous book, his relationship with his teenage daughter Random in this one adds new dimensions to his character, and shows that Adams is capable of genuine insight in addition to outright hilarity.
The new Guide is appropriately sinister, Old Thrashbarg and the Perfectly Normal Beast and the aliens who've lost their minds are very funny, and best (or worst?) of all, the Vogons are back! Adams somehow manages to expertly juggle all of these plotlines through complex and potentially confusing travel through time and multi-dimensional space. That in and of itself is an achievement. He packs an awful lot of value into such slim volumes.
If only there had been more!
Martin Freeman's narration is quite appropriate and enjoyable--but I can't compare it to Adams' own, as I haven't heard that version yet, so take it for what it's worth.
Good, but try to find the author's original reading
When I gave this edition a listen, I had hoped Martin Freeman would be an entertaining reader, given his involvement with the "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" movie. I had previously heard another edition of this book in cassette tape form, read by the author himself (Douglas Adams). Sadly, Freeman doesn't quite stack up to Adams in the narration department; his timing with the humorous text pales in comparison to the author's. I'd recommend (and will) finding the edition read, unabridged, by Douglas Adams. That's not to say that this edition is bad by any means. The material is still great, arguably the best in the Hitchhiker's series, I simply preferred the book-on-tape edition as read by the author.
A hilarious, zany tale evolves.
Douglas Adams' MOSTLY HARMLESS receives an outstanding reading by Martin Freeman, who has narrated other Adams titles before and who lends consistency and an excellent form to this story of one Arthur, who may be the only one to save Earth from obliteration. A hilarious, zany tale evolves. Both are top recommendations for any leisure lending audio collection.
