Thursday, November 08, 2007

The Wholy Book

My drive home from the client often spans the 6:30 to 7 "comedy" slot on BBC Radio 4. For the last six weeks, concluding yesterday, they have been playing the adaptation of, in my opinion, the finest novel ever written.

But the adaptation did not really work for me. The hero sounded more like a Harry Enfield character than the mysterious East-European that I remembered from the book.

The book is inexplicable anyway. It is a murder mystery, a ghost story, an exercise in philosophy, an English textbook, a discussion of religion, an historical novel, a magical tour. It covers the history of the world from the primordial slime of 4 billion years ago through Coleridge and Bach to quantum physics.

But I hope the novel is just a tiny bit like this blog. It is about detection. It is about finding incredibly simple answers to incredibly complicated questions. It is about a thousand different subjects. But somehow they all tie together. Just like the methods used inside it, the book itself is holistic.

However, unlike Dirk Gently, this blog is not going to save all life on this planet. And if it were to, I would invoice a lot more than he did :)

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