0
Crichton's State of Snore
22 April 2005
I've just finished reading Michael Crichton's latest 'thriller', State of Fear. I had expected it to be like most of his previous works: smart, sexy, action-oriented and with just enough science or history to make it believable. In all, I expected a good read as usual.
I was wrong. When it's not infuriating the reader with patronizing lectures and pages dense with graphs, it's really a dull, cookie-cutter effort that might have been written by any amateur.
Well, it sure is packed with science. Densely packed. So much so I started taking notes for the big exam I expected to have to write at the end of the book. With enough graphs and numbers to make t qualify as a textbook, State of Fear is less a novel than a dissertation with some cartoon characters thrown in to make the dense data slightly more digestible.
Calling his characters "cartoon" does disservice to the art and craft of cartoonists. Wooden suggests they at least have density. Cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional caricatures is more like it. Or perhaps children's stick figures... none of them offer much more than crayon outlines.
Most of his characters are plucked from what seems like Fiction 101 training session lessons: goofy good guy, nasty evil bad guy, plucky good girl, egomaniacal bad guy... stereotypes that parody his earlier works. They're as unbelievable as the characters on "reality" TV shows pretending not to be paid actors following a carefully choreographed script. Crichton's characters have few redeeming characteristics to make readers sympathize with them, and are drawn so thinly as to be immediately forgettable when they disappear from any particular chapter.
The entire cast seems to have been cobbled together for the single purpose of propelling Crichton's strident lectures on good science-bad science. Most of the book is a dreary talking-heads' dialogue in the Platonic manner aimed at guiding the reader - through the characters - along the path to the desired conclusion without any opportunity to wander off on his or her own. The characters sometimes make feeble attempts to challenge the omniscient teacher with some newspaper-headline response or sputtered protest of indignation, all of which are easily dismembered by the superior lecturer.
The women in Crichton's work are tissue-thin women who have a glossy similarity, clones from the pages of Fitness magazine; the men were probably copied from old Batman or Superman comic books.
His main protagonist, Peter Evans, is possibly the most hapless, useless, spineless, dim-witted lead character I've encountered in fiction. He's a lawyer - and that's his best characteristic. It goes downhill from there. He seems to spend most of the book sputtering vague objections to someone's point, or whining over his current catastrophic situation. I fully expected him to say "Doh!" after one of the interminable lectures he receives from mysterious superguy John Kenner, who is the deus ex machina arriving in the nick of time to save Evans from yet another fine mess, in a manner not at all unlike Doc Savage.
Most of the other characters read like the invitee list to a California soiree - millionaires, billionaires, svelte women who are as handy with a revolver as they are with a tennis racket, and of course, a plethora of lawyers. I almost expected the Dalai Lama to have a cameo role.
Crichton's scolding attacks on the duplicitous, evil environmentalists read like an angry headmistress berating her errant students for failing their tests. Instead of getting his readers to agree with him through persuasion, logic and fact, Crichton comes across like a male version of that harridan of the neocons, Anne Coulter, and his defence of the opponents of environmentalists reads equally pathetic and embarrassing as Coulter's shrill defence of George Bush.
And this is too bad for Crichton's intended point. He does make many good points - supported as expected with 27 8-by-10 colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one of them... okay, that's from Alice's Restaurant, not State of Fear. I couldn't help but think of Arlo Guthrie's tune as I slogged through the pages of graphics, the annotated bibliography and the author's afterword...
I consider myself typical in my concern over environmental issues. I would love to be convinced that the fears were wrong, that my worries were unfounded, that the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. I wanted some hope that all those scientists could possibly be wrong and we still have a chance to fix things. Maybe we do. But Crichton didn't convince me. All he did was polarize the argument more forcefully.
If Crichton had used more interesting, and even slightly believable, characters, presented his intended conclusions in a less pedantic manner, and given us a reasonably coherent plot, he might have convinced me. Sarah Smith does this very same sort of thing about the authorship debate in "Chasing Shakespeares." Now while I didn't agree with her inevitable conclusion (DeVere did it...), her arguments were compellingly presented in an entertaining manner, her characters were engrossing and generally three-dimensional, and her arguments didn't read like lectures or diatribes. I found myself wanting to research the evidence to see just how close to the truth she might be.
With State of Fear, on the other hand, I was simply happy to reach the end, suffer through the self-righteousness of the foregone conclusion, and close the book.
Even when Crichton made a valid point, it always seemed to be done in a smarmy, condescending fashion that got my back up. I might agree with him intellectually, but his tone made me resist on an emotional level. I found myself reading his book as an editor; hunting for flaws, inconsistencies, oversights.
State of Fear might be Crichton's anti-jeremiad against the doomsayers of the environmental agencies, but it comes across as another dreary screed, as equally full of castigation and denunciation as the works it attempts to counter.
Perhaps worst was Crichton's fatuous association between the "science" of eugenics and modern environmental and climatological sciences, in his author's afterword. While Crichton says, of course, eugenics and environmentalism are not at all similar, he none-the-less goes on the describe at great length the errors of eugenics, its cult of followers and the historical backlash - a piece full of innuendo, slyly implying that both are equally bad, equally dangerous "science."
Crichton's tosses the baby out with the bathwater in his cavalier dismissal of all aspects of the environmentalist movement; he treats everyone with a concern over environmental issues - global warming being the icon - as either sadly misinformed and misguided fop, or some form of terrorist intent on mass murder as a publicity stunt. I've heard of eco-terrorist attacks on polluters, counter-assaults against the rape of the landscape, and vandalism against environmentally-abusive corporations. I've never heard of any environmentalist group trying to drown a Sunday school children's picnic as a publicity event, as Crichton portrays.
Of course, it is fiction, so perhaps I shouldn't be upset. It may bear a resemblance to the real world, the way the TV charade Survivor bears a vague resemblance to reality, but in the final consideration, Crichton's work is not a populist book on environmental politics, much less a scholarly dissertation. It's simply a novel with some hot-button topics thrown in the ensure sales through controversy. What might have been a provocative, informative and intelligent thriller with a strong but message is instead a dreary, smug harangue for the anti-environmentalists in the Bush regime. It's as subtle as a brick and about as readable.
State of Fear sours my taste for any future efforts from this author's.
Here's another look at Crichton's latest snore-fest at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
I was wrong. When it's not infuriating the reader with patronizing lectures and pages dense with graphs, it's really a dull, cookie-cutter effort that might have been written by any amateur.
Well, it sure is packed with science. Densely packed. So much so I started taking notes for the big exam I expected to have to write at the end of the book. With enough graphs and numbers to make t qualify as a textbook, State of Fear is less a novel than a dissertation with some cartoon characters thrown in to make the dense data slightly more digestible.
Calling his characters "cartoon" does disservice to the art and craft of cartoonists. Wooden suggests they at least have density. Cardboard cutouts, two-dimensional caricatures is more like it. Or perhaps children's stick figures... none of them offer much more than crayon outlines.
Most of his characters are plucked from what seems like Fiction 101 training session lessons: goofy good guy, nasty evil bad guy, plucky good girl, egomaniacal bad guy... stereotypes that parody his earlier works. They're as unbelievable as the characters on "reality" TV shows pretending not to be paid actors following a carefully choreographed script. Crichton's characters have few redeeming characteristics to make readers sympathize with them, and are drawn so thinly as to be immediately forgettable when they disappear from any particular chapter.
The entire cast seems to have been cobbled together for the single purpose of propelling Crichton's strident lectures on good science-bad science. Most of the book is a dreary talking-heads' dialogue in the Platonic manner aimed at guiding the reader - through the characters - along the path to the desired conclusion without any opportunity to wander off on his or her own. The characters sometimes make feeble attempts to challenge the omniscient teacher with some newspaper-headline response or sputtered protest of indignation, all of which are easily dismembered by the superior lecturer.
The women in Crichton's work are tissue-thin women who have a glossy similarity, clones from the pages of Fitness magazine; the men were probably copied from old Batman or Superman comic books.
His main protagonist, Peter Evans, is possibly the most hapless, useless, spineless, dim-witted lead character I've encountered in fiction. He's a lawyer - and that's his best characteristic. It goes downhill from there. He seems to spend most of the book sputtering vague objections to someone's point, or whining over his current catastrophic situation. I fully expected him to say "Doh!" after one of the interminable lectures he receives from mysterious superguy John Kenner, who is the deus ex machina arriving in the nick of time to save Evans from yet another fine mess, in a manner not at all unlike Doc Savage.
Most of the other characters read like the invitee list to a California soiree - millionaires, billionaires, svelte women who are as handy with a revolver as they are with a tennis racket, and of course, a plethora of lawyers. I almost expected the Dalai Lama to have a cameo role.
Crichton's scolding attacks on the duplicitous, evil environmentalists read like an angry headmistress berating her errant students for failing their tests. Instead of getting his readers to agree with him through persuasion, logic and fact, Crichton comes across like a male version of that harridan of the neocons, Anne Coulter, and his defence of the opponents of environmentalists reads equally pathetic and embarrassing as Coulter's shrill defence of George Bush.
And this is too bad for Crichton's intended point. He does make many good points - supported as expected with 27 8-by-10 colour glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one of them... okay, that's from Alice's Restaurant, not State of Fear. I couldn't help but think of Arlo Guthrie's tune as I slogged through the pages of graphics, the annotated bibliography and the author's afterword...
I consider myself typical in my concern over environmental issues. I would love to be convinced that the fears were wrong, that my worries were unfounded, that the world isn't going to hell in a handbasket. I wanted some hope that all those scientists could possibly be wrong and we still have a chance to fix things. Maybe we do. But Crichton didn't convince me. All he did was polarize the argument more forcefully.
If Crichton had used more interesting, and even slightly believable, characters, presented his intended conclusions in a less pedantic manner, and given us a reasonably coherent plot, he might have convinced me. Sarah Smith does this very same sort of thing about the authorship debate in "Chasing Shakespeares." Now while I didn't agree with her inevitable conclusion (DeVere did it...), her arguments were compellingly presented in an entertaining manner, her characters were engrossing and generally three-dimensional, and her arguments didn't read like lectures or diatribes. I found myself wanting to research the evidence to see just how close to the truth she might be.
With State of Fear, on the other hand, I was simply happy to reach the end, suffer through the self-righteousness of the foregone conclusion, and close the book.
Even when Crichton made a valid point, it always seemed to be done in a smarmy, condescending fashion that got my back up. I might agree with him intellectually, but his tone made me resist on an emotional level. I found myself reading his book as an editor; hunting for flaws, inconsistencies, oversights.
State of Fear might be Crichton's anti-jeremiad against the doomsayers of the environmental agencies, but it comes across as another dreary screed, as equally full of castigation and denunciation as the works it attempts to counter.
Perhaps worst was Crichton's fatuous association between the "science" of eugenics and modern environmental and climatological sciences, in his author's afterword. While Crichton says, of course, eugenics and environmentalism are not at all similar, he none-the-less goes on the describe at great length the errors of eugenics, its cult of followers and the historical backlash - a piece full of innuendo, slyly implying that both are equally bad, equally dangerous "science."
Crichton's tosses the baby out with the bathwater in his cavalier dismissal of all aspects of the environmentalist movement; he treats everyone with a concern over environmental issues - global warming being the icon - as either sadly misinformed and misguided fop, or some form of terrorist intent on mass murder as a publicity stunt. I've heard of eco-terrorist attacks on polluters, counter-assaults against the rape of the landscape, and vandalism against environmentally-abusive corporations. I've never heard of any environmentalist group trying to drown a Sunday school children's picnic as a publicity event, as Crichton portrays.
Of course, it is fiction, so perhaps I shouldn't be upset. It may bear a resemblance to the real world, the way the TV charade Survivor bears a vague resemblance to reality, but in the final consideration, Crichton's work is not a populist book on environmental politics, much less a scholarly dissertation. It's simply a novel with some hot-button topics thrown in the ensure sales through controversy. What might have been a provocative, informative and intelligent thriller with a strong but message is instead a dreary, smug harangue for the anti-environmentalists in the Bush regime. It's as subtle as a brick and about as readable.
State of Fear sours my taste for any future efforts from this author's.
Here's another look at Crichton's latest snore-fest at the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal
Quote
...a work of thinly disguised political commentary, in which a wildly implausible plot--eco-terrorists supplant Al Qaeda as the leading global menace, unveiling dastardly weather modification schemes to convince the public of a nonexistent global warming threat--serves as an excuse for a string of Socratic-style dialogues about climate science.
