Date: Fri 10-Nov-1995

Publication: Bee

Author: KIMH

Illustration: C

Location: A-11

Quick Words:

Lost-World-Crichton-dinosaurs

Full Text:

Michael Crichton's Dinosaurs Live Once Again - On "The Lost World"

(Book Review)

By Kim J. Harmon

Evolution wiped out the dinosaurs over 65 million years ago, but author

Michael Crichton continues to keep the myth alive.

His 1993 novel, Jurassic Park, started out as a scientific-concept novel woven

together with a thick thread of suspense and adventure, but it became much

more than that when the novel transformed itself into one of the biggest

box-office/marketing smashes in history.

With the economic realities of that still making trips to the toy stores a

little more challenging than usual for parents, it was only a matter of time

before the sequel appeared.

And it has.

The Lost World (Michael Crichton; copyright 1995, published by Alfred A. Knopf

Inc., 393 pages, $25.95) takes us back to the islands off Costa Rica to

discover what has happened in the six years since the park was destroyed and

abandoned.

Something has survived.

Not in the actual park, though, but on a nearby island where the laboratory

complex of Jurassic Park was built. It was there that the animals had been

engineered, born, and raised before being transported to the park, but it was

also there where the very ecology has been transformed.

The complex had been abandoned, but the animals were not destroyed, and now

dinosaurs have become the dominant life form on the island - their own lost

world, a peek at life 65 millions years ago.

Dr Richard Levine, not knowing anything about Jurassic Park, nevertheless

theorized, based on local Costa Rican myths and supposedly factual reports,

the existence of an actual lost world, where dinosaurs were passed over and

forgotten by evolution. He forms his own expedition to Costa Rica and after he

is attacked and nearly killed by a dinosaur, the adventure really takes off.

Jurassic Park was as much a scientific-concept novel as it was an adventure

story as Crichton took great pains to explain how the idea of cloning

dinosaurs wasn't really all that inconceivable. He also explored the concept

and consequences of two species, separated by 65 million years of evolution,

finally interacting. The adventure and suspense, the consequences of the park

systems breaking down and the dinosaurs being allowed to roam free were almost

secondary, at times, to the story.

That's not the case with The Lost World. With the scientific concepts of

cloned dinosaurs well explained, Crichton spent a lot of time and energy

developing the adventure and suspense while only briefly discussing other

concepts such as animal behavior and extinction.

It makes for a much sleeker, faster-moving novel whose energy is derived

almost entirely from the people on the island and their efforts to get off

alive.

The Lost World is not as rich and not as complex as Jurassic Park but the

suspense makes the read worthwhile.

Michael Crichton's The Lost World is available at The Book Review in Sand Hill

Plaza, Route 25 in Newtown. Hours are Monday through Thursday, 9 am to 7 pm;

Friday and Saturday, 9 am to 9 pm; and Sunday, 11 am to 6 pm.