★★★☆☆ Mallory Viridian's Holistic Detective Agency

Station Eternity

Mur Lafferty

At about the halfway point, I found myself thinking, "I have read this before. Not exactly this, but something in this same style, where everything that happens is a massive coincidence, and everyone you meet is someone who was important in your past life..." My first thought was Les Miserables, but it wasn't quite that. And then I thought, Magic Realism: Cien años de soledad, La Casa de los Espiritus. That was closer. And then I got it: Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, by Douglas Adams. And that is clearly the right answer, as indicated by this dedication,

To Douglas Adams, who will never know the impression he made on so many writers, and Alasdair Stuart, who is the world’s best electric monk.

(The mention of the electric monk shows that Dirk Gently is one of the books Lafferty has in mind.) Dirk Gently walks the world through a blizzard of extraordinary, totally implausible coincidence. He solves crimes by wandering around doing whatever he wants to do regardless of what the crime is, expecting that the solution will, in some entirely implausible way, fall into his hands. Which it always does. (There is a very funny scene somewhere in the two novels where he shouts at the universe, "Stop it!" The universe, of course, ignores him.) To enjoy a Dirk Gently book, you have to stop expecting anything to be plausible or even make sense and embrace the Weird.

Station Eternity is like the Dirk Gently novels, with Mallory Viridian standing in for Dirk Gently. Mallory, in addition to being beset by weird coincidences, is surrounded by murders. They always happen when she's around. She has the same sort of directionless investigating style as Dirk Gently, "As usual, she didn’t know what she was looking for, but she knew she would when she found it." Nothing in the story really makes sense. For instance, the aliens are no more realistic or well-thought-out than Adams' Haggunenons or Hooloovoos (hyperintelligent shades of the color blue). It's all an absurd hodgepodge, and you have to let it take you to enjoy Station Eternity.

Unfortunately, Lafferty is not as good at this as Adams. She does not, for instance, have Adams's extraordinary versatility with word-play. (Well, who does?) In the end, Lafferty explains more than Adams, and when the book ends and you've read the epilogs, most of the plot has been explained. My advice, take it or leave it, is to not try very hard to understand what's happening or what happened. In the end, it doesn't ultimately make a great deal of sense. Just let it wash over you and enjoy it. I did.

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