Jurassic Park

Summary:

When an eccentric billionaire chases down his dream to create a dinosaur theme park with live re-creations of pre-historic animals, he assembles a team of scientists and creates shell companies to acquire the genetic material to make it happen. When the island is nearly complete, he invites the paleontologists and a mathematician he consulted with to preview what he’d accomplished, but chaos reigns and a peaceful weekend turns into a nightmare.

Review:

I’ve been a Jurassic Park fan for most of my life. I watched the movie in the theater when I was six years old and have loved it since. I had not, however, read the book until now and boy am I glad I did.

The movie adaptation strays a good bit from the book, but stays true to the core of the story. Most of the things they cut or changed were really setup for the second book in the series or simply slight modifications on the original.

The first thing I appreciate about Michael Crichton’s work is that his prose flows so naturally. Though he has to do a good bit of world building to help you understand how paleontology works, how cloning DNA might work, the various dinosaur facts, etc. he does so without bogging down the story. I noticed several times that he was telling me, the reader, “facts” about the story and I didn’t mind one bit.

Second, the way he writes multiple points of view is masterful. I was gripped by how well he uses this as a tool to build tension and create a sense of time passing, whether its a few minutes or several hours. He will shift into a character’s perspective, walk them through a scene, then leave them on a tense point and shift to another character to repeat. The previous character may not be revisted for several chapters, which means you feel relieved when you meet them again. It’s so well done.

He also does a brilliant job of making several promises and fulfilling them. As the story unfolds, you realize that Hammond’s idealistic view of his island is far from the truth and that problems will arise. One of the brilliant promises he makes early on is that the raptors are the most dangerous dinosaurs on the island, but you don’t actually meet them in the wild until nearly 75% through the book. In other words, he saves the best for last.

I didn’t expect as much of the gore as there was. I don’t know why, as I should’ve expected there to be bloody deaths, but they always caught me off guard. It’s definitely not horror level gore, but he describes entrails being spilled out and eaten more than once.

All in all, this was a phenomenal book. It’s my first book by Chrichton and won’t be my last. I will likely read the second installment in the series, but I also want to check out some of his other work.