Book Review: 'Jurassic Park'

Cover art for the 1990 first edition by Chip Kidd. (C) 1990 Alfred A. Knopf

Nowadays, the title Jurassic Park conjures up images from a series of films which began with Steven Spielberg's Apatosaurus-sized blockbuster and became an ongoing franchise. As of this writing, Universal Pictures has released five films in the series, including The Lost World: Jurassic Park, Jurassic Park III, Jurassic World, and this year’s Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom

 This, of course, is to be expected and is not exactly a new concept in Hollywood; Jaws, which was Spielberg's first real blockbuster (and is in fact the grandfather of the modern "monster hit movie") also started out as a decent horror film about a predator with sharp teeth that, um, snacked on people...and should have, like its 1993 cinematic heir, should have been left as a stand-alone film.

What some people tend to forget is that both these franchise-starting Spielberg films were adaptations of best-selling summer-season beach reads (Jaws, for instance, was written by Peter Benchley). Not meant to be literary classics in the same category as, say, the collected works of William Shakespeare or Ernest Hemingway, Benchley's shark novel and Michael Crichton's original 1990 novel, Jurassic Park, are entertaining –  if easily disposed of – mixes of science, horror, and melodrama.

Crichton's novel contains the same basic premise as the screenplay he later co-wrote with David Koepp (The Lost World: Jurassic Park ): eccentric billionaire John Hammond, through his huge bio-genetics company InGen, funds a top-secret scientific project to clone dinosaurs from fossilized DNA and populate the Mother of All Theme Attractions, Jurassic Park.

But after a series of incidents that Hammond manages to keep hidden from public view (velociraptors snack on unsuspecting Costa Rican laborers, for instance), InGen's board of directors sends attorney Donald Gennaro and a team of independent observers to inspect Hammond's theme park on Isla Nublar off the coast of Costa Rica. Their mission: to evaluate Jurassic Park's safety measures and its viability as a money-making tourist attraction.

In this excerpt from the prologue, Crichton describes one of the incidents that Hammond seeks to cover up:

Tina ran until she was exhausted, and then she threw herself down on the sand and gleefully rolled to the water’s edge. The ocean was warm, and there was hardly any surf at all. She sat for a while, catching her breath, and then she looked back toward her parents and the car, to see how far she had come.

Her mother waved, beckoning her to return. Tina waved back cheerfully, pretending she didn’t understand. Tina didn’t want to put sunscreen on. And she didn’t want to go back and hear her mother talk about losing weight. She wanted to stay right here and maybe see a sloth.

Tina had seen a sloth two days earlier at the zoo in San Jose. It looked like a Muppets character, and it seemed harmless. In any case, it couldn’t move fast; she could easily outrun it.

Now her mother was calling to her, and Tina decided to move out of the sun, back from the water, to the shade of the palm trees. In this part of the beach, the palm trees overhung a gnarled tangle of mangrove roots, which blocked any attempt to penetrate inland. Tina sat in the sand and kicked the dried mangrove leaves. She noticed many bird tracks in the sand. Costa Rica was famous for its birds. The guidebooks said there were three times as many birds in Costa Rica as in all of America and Canada.

In the sand, some of the three-toed bird tracks were small and so faint they could hardly be seen. Other tracks were large and cut deeper in the sand. Tina was looking idly at the tracks when she heard a chirping, followed by a rustling in the mangrove thicket.

Did sloths make a chirping sound? Tina didn’t think so, but she wasn’t sure. The chirping was probably some ocean bird. She waited quietly, not moving, hearing the rustling again, and finally she saw the source of the sounds. A few yards away, a lizard emerged from the mangrove roots and peered at her.

Tina held her breath. A new animal for her list! The lizard stood up on its hind legs, balancing on its thick tail, and stared at her. Standing like that, it was almost a foot tall, dark green with brown stripes along its back. Its tiny front legs ended in little lizard fingers that wiggled in the air. The lizard cocked its head as it looked at her.

Tina thought it was cute. Sort of like a big salamander. She raised her hand and wiggled her fingers back.

The lizard wasn’t frightened. It came toward her, walking upright on its hind legs. It was hardly bigger than a chicken, and like a chicken it bobbed its head as it walked. Tina thought it would make a wonderful pet.

She noticed that the lizard left three-toed tracks that looked exactly like bird tracks. The lizard came closer to Tina. She kept her body still, not wanting to frighten the little animal. She was amazed that it would come so close, but she remembered that this was a national park. All the animals in the park would know that they were protected. This lizard was probably tame. Maybe it even expected her to give it some food. Unfortunately, she didn’t have any. Slowly, Tina extended her hand, palm open, to show she didn’t have any food.

The lizard paused, cocked his head, and chirped.

“Sorry,” Tina said. “I just don’t have anything.”

And then, without warning, the lizard jumped up onto her outstretched hand. Tina could feel its little toes pinching the skin of her palm, and she felt the surprising weight of the animal’s body pressing her arm down.

And then the lizard scrambled up her arm, toward her face.

“I just wish I could see her,” Ellen Bowman said, squinting in the sunlight. “That’s all. Just see her.”

“I’m sure she’s fine,” Mike said, picking through the box lunch packed by the hotel. There was unappetizing grilled chicken and some kind of a meat-filled pastry. Not that Ellen would eat any of it.

“You don’t think she’d leave the beach?” Ellen said.

“No, hon, I don’t.”

“I feel so isolated here,” Ellen said.

“I thought that’s what you wanted,” Mike Bowman said.

“I did.”

“Well, then, what’s the problem?”

“I just wish I could see her, is all,” Ellen said.

Then, from down the beach, carried by the wind, they heard their daughter’s voice. She was screaming.

Interestingly, this scene is not included in Spielberg's first Jurassic Park, but it is the basis for the opening scene in The Lost World: Jurassic Park. 

As in the movie, everything that can go wrong does, exacerbated by a deliberate act of computerized sabotage by greedy and super-geeky Dennis Nedry, who has been hired by InGen's rival Biosys Inc. to steal some dino-embryos from Jurassic Park's cryogenic storage facilities.

This, of course, places Gennaro's team of Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, and Ian Malcolm in peril (along with Hammond's two grandchildren, Tim and Lex) as they get stranded outside without the protection of the Park's electrified fences. And, as in the movie, the main characters learn one simple yet painful lesson: people and dinosaurs shouldn't mix.

Crichton's novel is far darker than its 1993 film adaptation, with more nods to Stephen King than to Steven Spielberg, with more scenes of gore and violent death than would have been viable for a PG-13 film. Nevertheless, it's entertaining without being too bogged down in the nitty-gritty details of genetic engineering, industrial espionage, or computer sciences, although Crichton, as he has done in other works (The Terminal Man, The Andromeda Strain) touches all these topics in this fast-moving techno-chiller.