Earlier I linked to my review of Michael Crichton’s book State of Fear, which is a world-class example of how NOT to write a novel.
Later I got to reading what was at the link and realized that I had FORGOTTEN just how skin-peelingly bad this book is.
But some things are worth remembering.
So here goes. . . .
I have just finished Michael Crichton’s "novel" State of Fear and plan to review it. First a couple of disclaimers:
- This is a contemporary thriller novel and as such contains a
significant amount of cussing, non-described acts of sexual immorality,
and a scene of particularly gory brutality towards the end of the book. - I happen to agree with Crichton that the theory that global warming
is caused by "greenhouse gasses" is junk science, as are many other
items of popular junk science that he brings up in the course of the
novel. And I hope State of Fear manages to spark a real debate over global warming and enviro-nuttiness.
Now for the review:
Michael Crichton’s "novel" State of Fear is not actually a
novel but instead is a piece of propaganda masquerading as a novel. A
novel, of course, is a work of literature, a piece of art whereby words
are used to evoke aspects of the human psyche and of human experience
that transcend the merely ideological.
This transcendance of the ideological is what fails to happen in State of Fear.
According to the novel, there appear to be three kinds of people who believe in global warming:
- Those who don’t really know much about the science involved and
whose attachment to the environmental movement is so tenuous that they
can and will be flipped to the other side by the end of the novel, - Those who don’t really know much about the science involved but
whose attachment to the environmental movement is so strong that they
remain shrieking harpies no matter what facts they are confronted with,
and - Though who know that the science supporting global warming is junk
but whose commitment to environmentalist ideology (or something) is so
strong that they are willing to cause millions of casualties in order
to fake scientific data supporting global warming.
If there are any other kinds of people who believe in global
warming, they apparently occur sufficiently infrequently in nature that
they do not merit having a recurring character in the book.
Also according to State of Fear, there apparently aren’t
any evil big busines types willing to fake environmental data. Sure,
many charactes appearing in the pages of the novel talk incessantly
about this type of individual, but since no exemplars of this type
appear in its pages, they appear to be a myth–like unicorns, centaurs,
griffins, or global warmings.
With this ideologically one-sided cast of characters that inevitably
results from the above, does Crichton at least succeed in delivering a well-made piece of propaganda, like Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will?
No.
Artistically, the "novel" is a disaster on every level above basic spelling and grammar.
On the top level, there is the plot, which involves a huge,
sprawling mess of a story that is so poorly defined that much of the
time the reader has a better sense of what is going on when watching The Big Sleep
than reading this morass. There is no clearly defined central action,
and poorly-drawn characters do preposterous things at the drop of a hat.
F’rinstance:
- What should a young lawyer do when he checks his messages and
discovers that he has several calls from the local police department
telling him that he failed to show up for an appointment and they will
issue a warrant for his arrest if he doesn’t contact them? Should he
drop everything to get the matter taken care of? Make sure he doesn’t
get distracted by anything else before he does? Nooooo! He should
simply leave a message for the detective who called him and then zip
off on global assignments he has no qualifications for whatsoever! - A preening Hollywood actor/activist who plays the president on TV
(think: Martin Sheen) wants to tag along with the heroes on a mission
of vital global importance in a place so dangerous that death,
decapitation, and pre-death cannibalism are real possibilities. No
problem! Just have him sign a waiver! Don’t worry that he might
actually be a security risk to the mission since you already know he’s
working for the other side. Perish the thought that he might simply a
bumbling incompetent who would get in the way of your vital mission to
save millions! You’ll need him along so you can constantly argue with
him about the lack of evidence for global warming and other
environmentalist fetishes and make a fool of him at every turn. - Suppose that you’re an eco-terrorist mastermind. What should you do
with people who are getting too close to the truth? Shoot them and be
done with it? No! You should send your goons to use a tiny poison
critter that you keep in a plastic baggie filled with water to sting
them with a poison that will make them paralyzed but not kill them and
that will wear off in a few hours. What’s more, you can do this to
several people in the same city without any fear that after the toxin
has worn off that the victims will tell the police enough to figure out
who you are. So confident can you be of this that you don’t even need a
clearly defined REASON to do this to people. You can just do it as part
of some vaguely-defined attempt to be intimidating or something,
without even telling the victims what it is that they are supposed to
do or avoid doing in the wake of your goons’ attacks. - Suppose that you are a rich man who has been supporting environmental causes and who has somehow (FOR NO REASON EVER
EXPLAINED IN THE BOOK) come into possession of a set of coordinates of
where major eco-terrorist events will be happening–what do you do?
Turn the list over to the government? Put it in a safe deposit box
which only you and your lawyer have access to? No! You <SPOILER
SWIPE> hide it inside a
remote control in your TV room, where there is a lot of Asian art
including a Buddha statue, then fake your own death in an auto accident
so you can go personally face eco-terrorists all by your lonesome on a
south sea jungle island despite the fact you are an aging, overweight
alcoholic, and just before doing so you cryptically tell your lawyer
that it’s an old Buddhist philosophical saying that "Everything that
matters is not remote from where the Buddha sits"–seeming to imply (if anything) that the TV remote is NOT where the hidden list will be found.</SPOILER SWIPE> See? It’s obvious, ain’t it?
Below the level of plot is the level of character. How are the
characters? Thinly-drawn action adventure stereotypes, with one glaring
exception. Unfortunatley, the one glaring exception is the
pseudo-protagonist.
Y’see, this novel has an ensemble cast, but the omniscient narrator
focuses on one character in particular–a young L.A. lawyer–to use as
the lens through which to show us the vast majority of the story,
making him the pseudo-protagonist.
Because of his status in the narration there is a need for the reader to at least be able to like him (ideally, you’d want the reader to be able to identify
with him, but that’s too much to ask in a novel like this).
Unfortunately, you can’t. While every one of his colleagues–whether
they are personal assistants to rich men, rich men themselves, or other
lawyers–are apparently action heroes, this character is the ultimate
momma’s boy.
For the first chunk of the novel he does nothing but walk around,
take order from others, and ask simple questions so that the reader can
be given load after load of exposition. He takes no personal initiative
in doing anything.
Eventually, the action hero characters he’s surrounded by start
noticing what a wuss he is and our glimpses into their internal
monologues reveal words like "wimp" and "idiot" as descriptors of this
character–who is, you will remember, the main character the omniscient narrator has chosen for us to follow.
In the second part of the novel the character is placed in a
potentially life-threatening situation that causes him to experience a
collapse into such a passive, sobbing, whimpering wreck that even the
omniscient narrator seemingly turns away from him in disgust and
temporarily starts following his action-wouldbe-girlfriend until she
can rescue him from his predicament.
Just before this event occurs the character is wondering to himself
why the action-wouldbe-girlfriend (i.e., the action hero woman who he
would like to date) doesn’t "take him seriously as a man"–a moment bound to leave the reader going "Hey! Buddy! No one in the audience takes you seriously as a man EITHER!"
Fortunately, getting his butt saved after his potentially
life-threatening experience starts to awaken a glimmer of intestinal
fortitude in him, and by the end of the novel he has learned to cuss (a
little) and he gets a romantic hug from his action-wannabe-girlfriend,
who is apparently transitioning into his action-actual-girlfriend for
no good reason.
If the plot and the characters are disasters, how about the dialogue and narration?
They suck eggs on toast.
Some passages are so excruciating that I found myself wondering "Didn’t they give Crichton a copy editor?"
One such instance occurred when a character says something to Momma’s
Boy in a foreign language and we read (quotation from memory):
"He didn’t know what it meant. But it’s meaning was clear."
Other
pasages contain monstrosities of dialogue that no copy editor could
fix. F’rinstance: Toward the very end of the book one triumphant good
guy character is expositing on his grand vision for the future, of how
to save environmentalism from itself, save science from its current
predicament, and generally improve society. (This speech is sometimes
so general that certain points remind one of the Monty Python sketch
"How To Do It," in which we are told that the way to cure all disease
is to invent a cure for something so that other doctors will take note
of you and then you can jolly well make sure they do everything right
and end all disease forever.)
This manifesto would go on for several pages without break except for the fact that Momma’s Boy gets to interrupt it with scintilating interlocutions like:
- "Okay."
- "It sounds difficult."
- "Okay. What else?"
- "Why hasn’t anyone else done it?"
- "Really?"
- "How?"
- "And?"
- "Anything else?"
- and (a second time) "Anything else?"
- and (a third time) "Anything else?"
I’m sorry, but no copy editor could fix a multi-page speech with
such transparent attempts to disguise it as dialogue. At that point
it’s the editor’s job to call the author and demand a re-write.
If the publishing house is interested in producing quality works, that is–as opposed to simply making money.
Oh, and lest I forget, there are numerous dropped threads
in this story. Like: Whatever happened about that arrest warrant that
Momma’s Boy got threatened with? And: How about other
established characters who left him messages and needed to talk to him?
And: What did the other critter-victims tell the police after the toxin
wore off? And: Where did that body come from that got washed up on the
beach and how did someone else’s clothes and watch get on it? And: Why
didn’t the heroes ever use the incriminating DVD to incriminate anybody?
And most importantly: What actually, y’know, happened to
the bad guys in the end? Did they go to jail? Were there congressional
hearings? Did they flee to countries without extradition treaties? Did
they manage to keep their cushy jobs? Did they just go out for sushi? What???
Crichton is interested in telling us none of these things.
But then, his "novel" was never about the story to begin with.
It’s a political tract that fails to rise above the level of those
theological "novels" (both Protestant and Catholic) in which one side
is always right and in which characters of opposing points of view exist only to serve as conversational foils to help illustrate the rightness of the protagonists–time after time after time.
It’s enough to make you scream.
Sounds like a rehash of Rising Sun, which consisted of brief snippets of plot (loosely speaking) hidden among diatribes about how the Japanese were going to buy the US. Then the Japanese economy went into the tank . . . .
I’m not a writer, but it seems like Crichton was in a hurry to crank out a book that could EASILY be adapted as a screenplay for a film debunking “The Day After Tomorrow”, also a piece of propaganda disguised as art (and hilarious, to boot!).
Problem is, it sounds like Crichton was so desperate to write a movie that he wrote down to the level of the Hollywood execs who would dumb-down and commercialize the thing anyway.
It’s like he anticipated all the idiotic changes that would result from screenplay and script meetings, and just wrote them in to get it over with.
It’s a shame, because if a movie ever needed debunking, it’s “The Day After Tomorrow”.
Have you ever seen any of those old WWII-era Warner Bros. cartoons that made fun of Hitler, Mussolini & Tojo? Well, those are just a little more subtle than “The Day After Tomorrow”, a liberal wish-filfillment dream that depicts Americas’s Inevitable Comeuppance as every disaster happening at once, and ends with the collapse of the U.S. into an orphan state that goes BEGGING, CRAWLING to the third-world for it’s very survival. YEAH!… not so high and mighty NOW, are you? You rich, filthy industrialists?
Is there such a thing as a “do-over” in the literary world, Jimmy? I know Crichton can do better.
“On the top level, there is the plot, which involves a huge, sprawling mess of a story that is so poorly defined that much of the time the reader has a better sense of what is going on when watching The Big Sleep than reading this morass.”
Bwa-ha-haa-haa! They released the original version of Big Sleep about 12 years back that made (a bit) more sense – I saw it in LA at a little revival house. The movie’s worth seeing for the chemestry between Bogie & Bacall alone!
As for Chrichton . . . well, aren’t most of his novels this way? Even Jurassic Park was a modern Frankenstein, of a sort. A bit better written, perhaps. He definitely has an agenda to his books from Andromeda Strain on.
To me Michael Crichton has become a lot like Tom Clancy. In both cases I enjoyed their earlier works but now I won’t touch anything they’ve written. And for exactly the same reason too.
Both are highly popular and very successful, if not always technically good, authors who have let their egos run away with their respective careers.
So now they turn out a great deal of dross, but their editors are scared to actually edit the manuscripts lest they have a hissy fit and sign on with some other publisher who will then gain the benefit of selling thousands of copies of their work simply because it has the correct name on the cover.
–arthur
So, what did you REALLY think of the book?
I wonder how you have time to analyze such a book. His books are usually a quick read. The thought process you put in to it seems over the top for such a book.
After it’s all said and done, Crichton should have know better and but more time into it.
After reading an earlier post about how heathens (non-believers) tend to make the best Christian movies, I had to stop and think about how even heathens can mess up their own Secular movies (or in this case, a novel).
Though I make no pretense of knowing Crichton’s religious background, the message he choses to bog down his book with is not a spiritual one. A similar dynamic seems to be at play: he is so concerned with grandstanding his message, he forgets the needs of his audience — who are seeking more art.
Your description of the three character types in the book also stood out as being lame caricatures informed by a flawed, modernist understanding of faith.
There are those who believe what they do because they are stupid but have little faith (attachment) in the externals (the environmental movement), those who are stupid in their belief but have great attachment to the externals, and those who care more about externals than the truth that should inform the externals.
The first two groups use their “faith” to preserve their ignorance in the face of contradictory evidence. Faith is how these people protect themselves from truth.
As Catholics in an unbelieving world, I think we have to wary of such working understandings of faith. We believe what we do because it is true — and plainly so — on all of the universal layers of perception. Though there may be isolated events which test our personal faith, we do not at any level — even subconsciously — act, think, or say that what we believe makes no sense. We believe belief makes sense.
Clearly writers like Crichton do not.
The third type of character reminds me of the type anti-Catholic caricature you find books that are brown.
These characters know the truth, they know it contradicts what they are attached to, but they maliciously go about perpetuating their insane myths because of power, money, or just a plain old black heart.
This fundamentally makes no sense to me whatsoever. I posit that even the most maniacal and destructive of demagogues was at least sincere in his crazed ego-centrism. He may have had doubts during his formation, but at the height of his insanity, he did not believe one thing and do the exact opposite. Otherwise, he would be the first cardboard human villian.
The fact that such nonsensical portrayals have great currency among the populace when the people and institutions being savaged are religious but absolutely none when the same views are mapped onto Secular characters says a lot for our culture and how lowly we view religion.
I agree with Gene, who says, “aren’t most of [Crichton’s] novels this way?”
I remember reading “Jurassic Park” and thinking, “Gosh. This guy is really more interested in this sexy new weird math called ‘chaos theory’than he is with nuts-and-bolts questions like, ‘What would happen if interesting people that we care about were attacked by dinosaurs?'”
Actually, I can’t think of a Crichton book that does have interesting characters. His attempts to have well-rounded characters are just embarrassing to read (e.g., the protagonist in Prey).
Orson Scott Card uses MICE as an acronymn for the things that make a story tick: milieu, idea, character, and event. Crichton has always been king of the idea story, and when he finds an interesting idea that he doesn’t preach too much about, he can write a very readable story. But they’re going to be thin because he just doesn’t do the other three all that well (character pretty much not at all), so when the idea fails, his novels get wretched.
I have not read the book, but you know what I couldn’t help thinking when I read your review? Crighton is trying (unsuccessfully) to copy the propaganda technique that Dan Brown used against the Catholic Church and Christianity in The D’Vinci Code.
I will repeat my comment from the last time you wrote about this.
Would you object less if it was called a work of fiction rather than a novel?
I enjoyed the book. Not as a good novel (with the defects you noted), but as a particularly good screed against the PC-global warming nutcases out there.