Dragon Teeth
Michael Crichton
HarperCollins Publishers
2017 295
Pages
The late, great SF maestro Arthur C Clarke once postulated that many extinct species could possibly be
resurrected - once the science of
genetics had advanced enough.
Michael Crichton took that
idea forward with his novel Jurassic Park, later filmed by Steven
Spielberg. In Dragon Teeth, his posthumous “other dinosaur novel” Crichton
takes a look backwards at the early days of palaeontology in 19th
century America. From beginnings in England where certain fossil remains were
first recognized as the remains of a long extinct order of giant reptilian
creatures, the focus of hunting for dinosaurs had shifted from Europe to North America
by 1870.
This scientific effort was
fuelled, in part, by the bitter rivalry between feuding real-life Professors Edward
Drinker Cope, University of Pennsylvania, and Othniel Charles Marsh
(of Yale). Their fanatically aggressive drive to outdo each other in the
discovery of new dinosaur species led to what was called “the bone wars” and
“the great dinosaur rush” of the 1800s that paralleled the contemporaneous gold
rush in the American West. Crichton has actually downplayed the lengths these
two would go to, to lash out at each other - as he felt the truth was far too
excessive to be plausible!
Caught between these rivals
is the fictitious William Jason Tertullius Johnson; the spoiled elder son of a
wealthy Philadelphia shipbuilder studying at Yale. An unfriendly wager that the
sheltered and privileged Johnson wouldn’t be able to rough it out on America’s
wild lawless frontier goads him into joining Professor Marsh’s latest fossil
hunting expedition. Armed with some hastily-acquired photography skills, William
Johnson sets out by train with Marsh’s party for Colorado in 1876.
Unfortunately, the unscrupulous and paranoid
Marsh, convinced that Johnson is one of Cope’s spies out to steal his
discoveries, abandons the entitled brat in Wyoming en route. Ironically,
Professor Cope, also on his way west on a separate expedition, then comes
across Johnson and offers him a position as a photographer. Dragon Teeth
chronicles Johnson’s brutal coming-of-age in a very fraught old west that
hardens him, while stripping him of all privileges and comforts.
Part historical novel and
part action-adventure travelogue through the badlands of Wyoming and Montana, Dragon
Teeth also takes in the US Army’s war against the Sioux and Crow and the
gold rush in the Black Hills. Real-life figures such as Wyatt Earp and Robert Louis Stevenson also make appearances.
Despite his record as a
writer of numerous bestsellers, the late Michael Crichton (1942-2008) was no
master wordsmith. Great at spotting trends and generating ideas, he wasn't so hot at expressing these stylishly. His prose style was pedestrian, at best. Characterization and
conversations were the weakest part of his oeuvre; Crichton’s characters
tend to be flat and one-dimensional and their speech often a mere vehicle for
exposition. The impressive research he conducted – as evident in the extensive
bibliography at the end of this novel – frequently slows down the narrative with
exposition in “info dumps”.
Alas, Dragon Teeth has
all these weaknesses in full. The problems with this novel are compounded by it
being a draft extracted from the late author’s word processor and completed by
his widow, using his notes. As a result, there are significant gaps in the timeline
and a rushed, compressed quality in sections of the narrative.
A pity really, this novel had
all the potential of being a rip-roaring
historical adventure in the mode of George MacDonald Fraser’s far better Flashman And The Redskins.
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