It’s always a little rough reading a book after you’ve already seen the movie adaptation, especially when the movie is directed by someone like Steven Spielberg. The movie Jurassic Park is a taut thriller, perfectly calibrated to excite movie audiences. It has one striking image after another, and a score that expertly guides your emotional response.
Michael Crichton’s novel does feature some tense, thrilling scenes, and of course he should get a tremendous amount of credit for coming up with such a brilliant premise for a story to begin with. But the book does tend to drag a bit, especially compared to the film.
The problem is that Crichton tends to lecture. He has created a story full of technical experts in a lot of different areas, and others who have no knowledge at all within those areas. This gives him the space to have one character deliver full paragraphs of exposition to another, over and over again. The geneticist explains his work to the paleontologist. The paleontologist explains his work to the mathematician. The mathematician explains his work to everybody, whether they want to hear it or not.
That mathematician, Dr. Ian Malcolm (played on screen by Jeff Goldblum) is clearly Crichton’s favorite. Malcolm gets the privilege of being right about everything. Of course, thinking it’s a terrible idea to clone dinosaurs and open a theme park around them doesn’t seem like a brilliant insight, really. More of an obvious observation, if you ask me.
This is my first time reading a Michael Crichton novel. Crichton is one of the most successful authors of the 20th century, with a lot of bestsellers and many film adaptations. In some ways, I do see the appeal, but I have to say that there was a lot more talk about computer coding than I was expecting in a novel featuring terrifying dinosaurs.