‘Sup, punks. I finished re-reading Jurassic Park and have moved on to re-reading The Killer Angels. Military history was never really my thing, but I had it in my room and thought it might be worth a re-read; last time I read it was for AP US History class. So it’s been about a decade since I last thought about it in any capacity.
I have a lot of thoughts about Jurassic Park, mostly about how stupid Hammond is, but about some other things too. Like, Grant is the only guy in the book who manages a kill streak on velociraptors? Just sayin’.
---
Jurassic Park and the Author Rant
Michael Crichton is many things, but subtle he is not. If you pick up one of his books, it’s plain to see that he has opinions. In some cases, they’re about which characters you’re meant to like and dislike: villains and traitors are often unlikable from the start, and while they may have reasons for their actions, they still give off bad vibes. Dennis Nedry, for instance, is the computer guy for the park in Jurassic Park, and while he is given backstory justifying his betrayal of InGen (being blamed for things not his fault, not being given details on what he was building, forced to work without pay), he’s still depicted as an unlikable lazy slob, and Grant, our protagonist, instantly dislikes him on sight.
[Fun fact! In one of his novels Michael Crichton mentioned a throwaway character with no page-time after a critic who gave him bad reviews. Said character was a pedophile with a small penis. No, I’m not making this up.]
But sometimes, it’s not enough to tell you to dislike a character and like another. Sometimes, he decides he’s going to preach to you. And Jurassic Park does that through the mouth of Ian Malcolm, a mathematician and expert in Chaos Theory. He’s the main naysayer to the idea of the park, and after he gets wounded by the Tyrannosaurus Rex, Malcolm spends about half the book on morphine trying to recover in a room talking about the dangers of misapplied science, our treatment of nature, why we shouldn’t play God and other cheerful topics.
While I don’t see a lot of fans of the book complaining that much (though I don’t interact with the fandom that much either, so maybe I’m just missing it), it is something people have pointed out. Here’s a book about dinosaurs going wild and munching on people, and there are pages dedicated to Malcolm telling the characters about the right way to approach science and life and all of that. It’s a bit… odd.
This never bothered me that much when I first read it. Maybe it was because I was a pretentious middle schooler at the time, but I think in part because it functions a bit like comic relief? It isn’t comic relief, don’t get me wrong--it isn’t as if anything Malcolm says in these bits is particularly funny. And that’s good, because it’d be weird to switch from Arnold being ripped open by a raptor to a wacky comedy bit. But it is a relief; there are large sections of the book that are incredibly tense because the characters are exploring an island that’s full of creatures that would happily kill and eat them, desperately trying to get control of the situation. Because of this, having short chapters where that’s not happening is a relief to the reader, and a chance to catch one’s breath.
But yes, it is very preachy. And that makes it a bit difficult to justify. I could try to argue that it helps get across the themes of the book, and how everything went wrong, but that should be self-evident from the story itself. Just because I thought it worked okay doesn’t mean it’ll work okay for everyone. And Michael Crichton’s method of sandwiching the Author Tracts between bits of suspense and violence is something that a lot of authors don’t do.
Raise your hand if you’ve read a book, watched a movie, or watched a show where the narrative just stops in order to deliver a point about a topic. Not even necessarily exactly what Crichton does, where it’s switching between scenes, just a bit where everything stops. It happens more often than it should. Yeah, it’s not great. People aren’t always reading (or watching, or what have you) to be preached at. I’m not saying you can’t weave themes or messages, even heavy-handedly, into a story. Stories can teach; that’s fine. But it feels quite a bit different when the story has sections completely dedicated to that teaching, where it feels less like the author’s telling the story and more like he or she copied and pasted bits of his or her personal manifesto into the text.
This doesn’t make Jurassic Park a bad book; I think, on the whole, it’s a very good one. But again, while I didn’t mind Crichton telling me what he thought about the world through Malcolm’s words, that doesn’t mean I thought it was necessarily an objectively good writing decision. Yeah, he has opinions, and yeah, he wants to share them. But I think there were better ways of including that in the book than having a character sit down and spell it out to the reader in his own words.
As Limyaael said, if you want to write a pamphlet, then write a pamphlet.
---
No comments:
Post a Comment