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Reader Quality: Excellent; especially since its the author himself!

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Just a brilliant book, though I still need some help totally getting the ending with Coleridge. This is the kind of book you'll want to listen to at least twice to catch all the details. I have to say I enjoyed it as much or maybe more than the "Hitchhiker's Guide" series.

Adams' writing is the kind that makes you think and laugh; it knits absurdity and reason in a way that makes sense with a strong dose of good old human nature. You've got to love Dirk himself.

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SPOILERS! Here's an explanation of the ending... (from the DNA FAQ)
In our reality, Coleridge claimed to have composed Kubla Khan in its entirety in his sleep, and was in teh process of writing it down when a local interrupted him. When Coleridge returned to his work, he found that he could not remember the rest of the poem. Hence, there never was a second part of the poem. Yet, at the end of Chapter 6 when The Director Of English Studies is reading Kubla Khan the book states `The voice (that of the director of english studies) continues, reading the second, and altogether strange part of the poem.'

In the book, Kubla Khan has a second part. The book is not actually set in our existence. It is set in an existence in which the second part of Kubla Khan exists. This second part of the poem tells the ghost about the existence of the time machine and how to travel back and stop the ship from exploding. As we well know the explosion of the ship is what caused life to begin on this miserable little planet of ours. When Dirk and Reg realised this they simply went forward in time to when Coleridge was writing the second part of Kubla Khan and stopped him. Dirk just interrupted him and talked so much that Coleridge forgot what the second part was going to be about and therefore could not finish it! This change of history sent reality back into our perspective and the human race lived on (Yay, yippee!).

also, from here
The Person from Porlock was a visitor on Samuel Taylor Coleridge during his writing of the oriental poem Kubla Khan. Coleridge had perceived the entire course of the poem in a dream (possibly an opium-induced haze), but was interupted by this visitor from Porlock (a town in the South West of England, near Exmoor). Kubla Khan was never completed. This shows not only the fickle nature of human creativity and how one small detail can change history. In Coleridge's own words, published with the poem:

On awakening he appeared to himself to have a distinct recollection of the whole, and taking his pen, ink, and paper, instantly and eagerly wrote down the lines that are here preserved. At this moment he was unfortunately called out by a person on business from Porlock, and detained by him above an hour, and on his return to his room, found, to his no small surprise and mortification, that though he still retained some vague and dim recollection of the general purport of the vision, yet, with the exception of some eight or ten scattered lines and images, all the rest had passed away like the images on the surface of a stream into which a stone has been cast, but, alas! without the after restoration of the latter!

It is possible, of course, that this prologue, as well as the Person from Porlock, is intended to require as much 'suspension of disbelief' on the part of the reader as does the poem itself...

The episode was parodied in the novel Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency by Douglas Adams. In the book, the Man from Porlock is explained as a time-traveller who deliberately prevents Coleridge from completing the poem by breaking his train of thought, in order to save humanity.

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see also the WikiPedia Entry

-- MattWalsh - 09 Apr 2002