Six, and Ruth will be furious

My daughter has already told me I'm wrong about this, at length, on the telephone, twice.

Here is the position. For roughly twenty-five years this was among the most reliably borrowed things I had, and I stocked it in numbers. When a boy in Year 9 — and it was nearly always a boy, which is its own conversation — got into the phase where nothing was funny and everything was stupid, this was what got through. The towel. The Vogon poetry. The mice. I have watched a fourteen-year-old laugh out loud in a silent reading period and get told off for it, and I know exactly what that is worth, and I've not once run it down in front of a child.

But you asked me for a rating, and mine is six.

The jokes are excellent and the jokes are the entire structure, which is a different thing from being funny in a novel. It was a radio series and it never stops being one. Every chapter is a sketch: a set-up, a lovely long swerving digression in the narrator's voice, a payoff, and then we move, and nothing that happened before bears any weight on what comes after. The Guide entries are the best writing anywhere in it, and they amount to footnotes to a plot the author was plainly bored by.

Arthur Dent is a dressing gown with a mouth. That's fine for half an hour of radio; it is thin across a whole book. Trillian, the one woman, does nothing at all. She is described as having been at a party, she is described as clever, and then she stands about holding mice. Zaphod is a joke about an idiot, told repeatedly. The only figure with any pull is Marvin, and Marvin is a single gag that Adams knew was a single gag, which is why the good Marvin runs to about six lines and the tiresome one runs to four more volumes.

What actually irritates me, and I'm aware this is a middle-aged complaint, is the tone. Everything is undercut. Nothing is allowed to be felt for longer than a sentence before the narrator arrives to point out that it is all faintly ridiculous. Earth is destroyed in the third chapter. Six billion people. The book's answer is a very good joke about bypasses, which it is, and then nothing; the matter never returns with any weight on it. There's a version of this thing where that absence is a hole in Arthur, and Adams keeps walking up to it and walking away, because walking away is quicker and gets the bigger laugh.

I said something along these lines to a sixth former called Nathaniel in about 2001 and he looked at me as though I had insulted his mother. He said the whole point was that it doesn't matter. I said I understood that, and that a book spending its whole length telling you nothing matters has to be doing something else extremely well to earn the time, and he said it does, it's funny, and honestly he may have the better of that exchange.

Things I would defend to anyone: the prose is far better than its reputation. Adams writes a very clean sentence, the digressions have real rhythm, and he could turn a long sentence twice and still land it. The bowl of petunias still gets me. And the whole thing has a generosity about it. It isn't sneering at anybody; it is simply declining to be serious, and those are not the same.

Practical note, since it's the only part I'm actually qualified on. Buy this for a thirteen-year-old who has decided that reading is for other people. Don't buy it for a child who loves stories, because it isn't one; get them Diana Wynne Jones and stand well back. And nobody should give a nine-year-old the omnibus. It's five books, the last two are poor, the final one is genuinely miserable, and no child of that age needs to arrive there.

Six from me and about nine and a half from everybody I've ever discussed it with. Ruth says I've no sense of humour. My index has three entries for it, so evidently I keep trying.