Michael Crichton

The Price of Entertainment

Michael Crichton has written many bestsellers throughout his career. Many people like his books while at the same time there are many people out there who seem to find fault in everything he does. Crichton's novels are popular, but by no means perfect. Michael Crichton's novel, Jurassic Park, suffers from a lack of depth in its writing and creativeness due to Crichton's focus on keeping the reader entertained and providing an abundance of scientific information. Even though most people consider it a very good book, including me, if you stop and look you'll discover that just about all the book achieves, from a literary standpoint, is telling an interesting story (novelguide.com NA).
Crichton was born in Chicago in 1942 and was raised in Long Island (Chapman 67). With a B.A. in anthropology, Crichton was pursuing a career in medicine, which may have influenced his chosen genre. To help pay for college, he wrote books under many aliases. After the success of his book, The Andromeda Strain, he decided to give up medicine and become a full time writer. Over the years his best works have been in the science fiction genre. In 1990, after many successful books, Crichton wrote Jurassic Park, probably his best-known work to date (Chapman 67).
Published in 1990 and taking place in 1990, Jurassic Park is a story of "greed and technological experimentation gone awry" that mostly takes place on Isla Nublar off of Costa Rica where a genetics engineering company named InGen has found a way to recreate dinosaurs from DNA fragments found in prehistoric insects fossilized in amber (Chapman 68). The company created a few hundred dinosaurs and placed them on the island in hopes of creating a biological attraction that will make them millions. In an effort to increase their profits InGen decides to keep their staff to a minimum and rely mainly on computers and machines to do most of the work required to maintain the park, which eventually turns out to be a major factor in their undoing. InGen invites specialists from many different fields to come and evaluate the unfinished park after they realize that they are under surveillance by the EPA and their investors start to worry. The specialists include a mathematician, who is convinced that the park will inevitably fail, a botanist, the company's layer, and a paleontologist, who is the unofficial main character. At first the trip to the island goes as planned, except for Hammond, the owner, inviting his grandchildren, but then the company's computer maintenance man decides to shutdown the security systems while he steals from them, and when he doesn't return, due to a series of unfortunate events, things begin to get progressively worse. From this point the story turns into a predictable horror movie, inevitable t-rex attack, people get separated, the bad guys get picked off one by one, and even a good person dies just for an unexpected twist. Some people say that the book begins its predictable path at about page 80, where they arrive on the island and it is officially confirmed that InGen is growing dinosaurs (Chapman 68-71). The POV (point of view) of Jurassic Park is 3rd person omniscient (Uhl NA). The story is told very straightforward and clear through many episodes that switch between the characters in order to clearly connect the events, show cause and effect relationships, and to build suspense to keep the reader interested. There are two main conflicts in Jurassic Park. The first and more obvious conflict is human against nature. This is shown best through Jurassic Park itself, humans playing god and creating extinct animals then attempting to control them. Human against nature is also shown as the people try to fend off and escape the dinosaurs after they escape their designated areas. The other main conflict is the good of the individual against the good of society. This conflict is shown through the fact that every time someone chooses their own interests above the good of others their situation is worsened, and vice versa, when someone puts the good of others above the good of themselves everyone benefits (Trembley 120-122).
One of the main themes in this book is, obviously, the dangers that genetic engineering poses and how loose restrictions o the industry can easily lead to its misuse, which also ties into another theme, our (humans) inability to control nature. This is demonstrated over and over again throughout the book. The first time this shows up is at the very beginning when the worker is being taken to the hospital, although the book doesn't say for sure that it is a genetically engineered dinosaur that attacks the worker, but if you know anything about the book then you should be able to put two and two together and figure out that the guy was mauled by a raptor. Soon after that you should be able to put two and two together once again and come to the conclusion that all is not well and some dinosaurs have escaped the island and are attacking the locals. This theme can also be related to just about every human versus nature conflict in the book. The part about loose restrictions leading to misuse is in the book too. The reason Jurassic Park is in Costa Rica is because their government didn't really have any restrictions on the industry, but if they wanted to set it up in the United States it would take far longer if it would be allowed to happen at all. Another major, and quite obvious, theme is the problems of relying too much on technology. This theme proves to be one of the protagonists' major problems seeing as how the park is almost completely run by technology (novelguide.com NA).With most action and science fiction stories a creative plot is usually more important than creativeness in other areas such as comparisons, deeper meanings, and characters. The same holds true for Jurassic Park. The characters in Jurassic Park "seem stereotypical, or two-dimensional entities created primarily for the purpose of enduring events" (Trembley 122). You have the all-around good antagonist, the beautiful blonde, the know- it- all professor and scientist, the money craving tycoon, the slob of a computer geek, the wiz kid, and even a lawyer that fears for his own skin. The characters are not only stereotypical, but also static by not going through any changes by the end of the book (Trembley 122-125). Grant, the primary protagonist, is a paleontologist who is invited to Jurassic Park because of his expertise on dinosaurs. "In the face of the crisis that occurs at the park, Grant is the perfect levelheaded, unbiased protagonist" (Uhl NA). Crichton uses Grant to tell a majority of the story and also uses him to give the readers most of the scientific information (Uhl NA). Dr. Sattler, Grant's graduate student, is a 24-year-old, attractive blonde. She is invited to the island because she is a paleobotanist, and it is her job to check the authenticity of the plants and environment in the park (novelguide.com NA). Tim Murphy fills the roll of the wiz kid in this story. He is exceptionally intelligent and is interested in dinosaurs. Familiar with Grant's work, Tim looks up to him from the start. Malcolm is described as a new kind of mathematician who is outgoing, cocky, and wears all black. He serves as the biggest critic of Jurassic Park and insisted that it would fail the first time Hammond asked him about it. I assume that he was invited to the park because Hammond wanted to prove him wrong. He forms this opinion from the chaos theory. He says that no matter how much planning and precautions InGen takes, they won't be able to control nature in the way they want to, and it turns out that he is correct. Since he is a generally good person, it is odd that he dies a horrible death as all the villains do. Hammond, the owner of InGen and Jurassic Park, is often considered as the main antagonist because he continuously insists that there is nothing seriously wrong with the park and refuses to listen to the advice of others who are trying to do what needs to be done to better the situation. He is shrewd, ambitious, and is so stubborn and greedy that it blinds him to the reality of the situation. Nedry serves as the main spark to the fire of chaos that quickly sweeps across Jurassic Park. He is described as the stereotypical fat slob. As the parks computer technician, and the only one who fully understands the complex computer system, he probably has the most control over the park, although he is the only one who knows it. Nedry's decision to betray InGen and shut down the security systems places everybody at the mercy of the dinosaurs (Uhl Na). Henry Wu is the chief geneticist at Jurassic Park and is responsible for figuring out how to clone the dinosaurs. It is surprising that he doesn't know much about the dinosaurs he is creating. Being the creator of the dinosaurs, standing on the side of the failing park, and refusing to admit to the others that he was careless in creating the dinosaurs, lands Wu on the side of the antagonists and eventually gets him mauled by a raptor near the end (novelguide.com NA).
Like most science-fiction stories Jurassic Park puts the plot above all, "It is therefore not the most sophisticated of books in terms of its use of language" (novelguide.com NA). There are few places where metaphors and similes are used. One of the few spots where Crichton decides to use more complicated literary devices is when he is trying to explain the chaos theory to the reader (novelguide.com NA). About the only other time metaphors and similes are used is when Crichton is trying to show the reader that dinosaurs are more closely related to bird rather than lizards (Uhl NA). For as few metaphors as this book has there are even fewer symbols. One of the more notable symbols in this book, and the only one I have been able to find mentioned, is the hupia. The hupia are supposedly spirits that live on an island near to Costa Rica and kidnap local children. The Costa Ricans believe in these and mistake the dinosaur attacks to be the hupia. "Crichton uses this idea to vilify the dinosaurs, making them even more fearsome forces of evil than they might be if they were not specifically targeting defenseless children" (novelguide.com NA). When compared to the amount of other literary elements in this book there is an abundance of foreshadowing. Crichton relies on foreshadowing to build suspense and keep the reader turning the pages and does a good job of it throughout the book.
Everybody is influenced by something or someone. Crichton's influences are fairly obvious. He appears to be influenced by other books and movies of the same genre. The book itself is also influenced by modern society as is any book based in modern times that hopes to be successful. Aside from "dinosaurs restored to life from fossilized DNA" (Miller NA), Jurassic Park doesn't have many original ideas. It resembles other books from the gothic and science fiction genres. The book focuses on the return of something dead and humans gaining the godlike power to create life similar to Frankenstein. Also, as in Frankenstein, the scientists aren't prepared to control their creation because they didn't intend on their creations to have wills of their own. Similar to War of the Worlds, the people in Jurassic Park are unprepared for a confrontation against an enemy that they know little about and are defeated and picked off easily. The book also resembles the movies King Kong and Godzilla in which ancient beasts set loose in the modern world cause many unexpected problems. "The usual Crichton tract is a near-future science-fiction thriller that extrapolates from cutting-edge concerns and is often tinged with satire or simple grumpiness about the whizzing speed of advances" (Newman NA). Jurassic Park follows this conclusion. Around the time Crichton was writing the book genetics was starting to become more of a serious issue with the quickly advancing technologies. People were afraid of cloning. They were concerned about ethical issues and rightly so, seeing as how it is still a major issue to this day. Jurassic Park is far fetched, but at the same time it is still somewhat realistic, and you can't help but think that in a few years a real Jurassic Park might open up. The book's almost believable storyline is probably what made it a best seller and one of the most publicly known works of literature, whether or not people read the book or saw the movie (Trembley 125-128).
Even though it is predictable and isn't littered with deeper meanings or screaming originality, Jurassic Park is still a very good book. Trust me I've read about 20 full length books in my life, I know what I'm talking about. Seriously though, if you liked the movies or are just bored then you should read this book. For those of you who are reading this and saying, "Why would I read the book if I've already seen the movie?" the book is different, and in my opinion better than the movie.