Review: "Dragon Teeth," by Michael Crichton

All new Crichton! New in the sense that the novel is new, but not so new in the sense that this novel takes place in the late 1800's. And the verdict: it sure is a snooze. Crichton has always been hit or miss for me. He's had his gems: Jurassic Park, State of Fear, even Airframe was all right. But with Dragon Teeth it really felt like Crichton was just phoning it in. This was a lazy, half-ass attempt at a novel. Now, I am not oblivious - I do know that Crichton is no longer alive; however, this was supposedly discovered in his archives, among which there are other completed but unpublished works. So, he did write this when he was alive (obviously) and therefore isn't getting any passes from me. The only thing that this novel really had working for it was the clever jacket art, which taps into your Jurassic Park nostalgia with a bolder and more modern look. That's about where the excitement stops for me. Even though I knew this book took place in the 1800's, and even though I knew it had nothing to do with living dinosaurs, I was really hoping for that knockout punch. After all, even the book was marketed by saying: "William joins forces with Cope and soon stumbles upon a discovery of historic proportions." I didn't think they meant literally...sheesh. I thought he would take a more fantastical, yet believable, approach to an epic discovery. Alas, the discovery of epic proportions is just a dinosaur bone. On the writing: everyone knows Crichton was no master wordsmith. And on a sentence by sentence examination, his writing in this one isn't awful. It's not yet approaching good though, either. Crichton has always been about the story, the tale he tells that opens up your mind to knew ideas. This novel did none of that for me for two reasons. First, Crichton took what should have been an 800 page epic and squashed it down into fewer than 300 pages. Second, Crichton seemed confused over whether he wanted to tell a historical fiction novel, or just a straight up historical account of these events. An aside - someone who I think does historical fiction well is Erik Larson. Let me flesh that out a bit. A lot of the material, and almost all of the events in this novel, are based on real accounts. Crichton uses mostly historical fact and lays out a story, inside which he even uses real quotations from personal diaries of the men involved. But the 'fiction' part of it gets drowned in the true historical part of it. I felt as though I was reading a poorly constructed history textbook on the early palaeontological expeditions of late 1800's. But what annoyed me most was the complete disregard for character development. Crichton crammed a 3 month journey into a tight novel, and the tight novel was broken up into smaller chapters, which were squished down into bit-sized paragraphs. And it was inside these bit-sized paragraphs that an entire story, days (sometimes weeks) long would take place in a few sentences. Then it was off to a point down the road a month later. There were so many massive time gaps that I felt like Crichton was simply being lazy and didn't want to do any real work. He slapped down the historical accounts which were already in front of him, strung them together with a few sentences of "fiction" and called it a day. Sigh. This novel could actually have been made into an epic novel, if he had taken the time to churn out about 600 more pages of material. We then could have gotten to learn the characters more. A lot of people die in this book, and I cared not of a single one (I know, how cold blooded of me). But there is some fascinating history that could have been examined, such as the ongoing wars between the white man and the Indian tribes (their words, not mine). I would have liked to see Crichton's estate tag on another author to this work (like they did with Micro) and then made something real out of it. Instead, it falls short. And like a sucker, I paid 36 buckaroos for this puppy. I'd enjoy seeing more Crichton books publish posthumously. But I'd urge whoever is in charge of that decision to take a careful read through the next one and ask themselves if the story has been told. And if there is something missing, fill it in. We like us some Crichton, and I'm sure the germ of a brilliant idea is there, but it may need to be stretched out a bit. No harm in that. Probably less than two stars, but I'm rounding up because I'm nice like that. ;)