The Salmon of Doubt

The book began when he was sent to Madagascar by a magazine to find a rare type of lemur. He thought this would be quite interesting, but it turned into a complete revelation. His fascination with ecology led to an interest in evolution. “I’d been given a thread to pull, and following that lead began to open up issues to me that became the object of the greatest fascination.” A link at the bottom of his e-mails now directs people to the Dian Fossey Trust, which works to protect gorillas, and Save the Rhino. Adams was also a signatory to the Great Ape Project, which argued for a change of moral status for great apes, recognising their rights to “life, liberty, and freedom from torture.” He was a founding member of the team that launched Comic Relief, but he has never been a hairshirt sort of activist. The parties he held at his Islington home would feature music by various legendary rock stars—Gary Brooker of Procol Harum once sang the whole of “A Whiter Shade of Pale,” including all the abandoned verses—and were peopled by media aristocracy and high-tech billionaires. Slightly less orthodoxly—for an enthusiastic, almost evangelical atheist—he would also host carol services every Christmas. “As a child I was an active Christian. I used to love the school choir and remember the carol service as always such an emotional thing.” He adds Bach to the Beatles and the Pythons in his pantheon of influences, but how does this square with his passionate atheism? “Life is full of things that move or affect you in one way or another,” he explains. “The fact that I think Bach was mistaken doesn’t alter the fact that I think the B-minor Mass is one of the great pinnacles of human achievement. It still absolutely moves me to tears to hear it. I find the whole business of religion profoundly interesting. But it does mystify me that otherwise intelligent people take it seriously.” This attachment to traditional structures, if not traditional beliefs, is carried over in the fact that his daughter, Polly, who was born in 1994, has four non-godparents. Mary Allen is one of them, and it was she who introduced Adams to his wife, the barrister Jane Belson. Allen says, “In the early eighties Douglas was going through some writing crisis and was ringing me every day. I eventually asked him whether he was lonely. It seemed that he was, so we decided he needed someone to share his huge flat. Jane moved in.” After several false starts, they married in 1991 and lived in Islington until last year, when the family moved to Santa Barbara.

“With new, more-immature technologies there is a danger in getting excited about all the ways you can push them forward at the expense of what you want to say. It is therefore rewarding to work in a medium where you don’t have to solve those problems because it is a mature medium.”

After such a long fallow period he wisely notes that many of these new projects and ideas will fall by the wayside. “But I’ve been out of the mainstream of novel writing for several years and I really needed to take that break. I’ve been thinking hard and thinking creatively about a whole load of stuff that is not novel writing. As opposed to running on empty, it now feels like the tank is full again.”

LIFE AT A GLANCE: Douglas Noel Adams BORN: March 11, 1952, Cambridge.

EDUCATION: Brentwood School, Essex; St. John’s College, Cambridge.

MARRIED: 1991 Jane Belson (one daughter, Polly, born 1994).

CAREER: 1974-78 radio and television writer; 1978 BBC radio producer. SOME SCRIPTS: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1978 and 1980 (radio), 1981 (television).

GAMES: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, 1984; Bureaucracy, 1987; Starship Titanic, 1997.

Foreword This is a very Douglassy moment for me. Douglassy moments are most likely to involve: Apple Macintosh Computers Impossible deadlines Ed Victor, Douglas’s agent Endangered species Excessively expensive five star-hotels I am tapping at a (Macintosh) computer as I fight a deadline imposed on me by Ed Victor. Would I please see if I might provide a foreword for The Salmon of Doubt by next Tuesday?