Krishna
Michael Crichton, of course, is the author of numerous thrillers based on latest scientific developments. He writes them not as a science author but a thriller writer, and is famous for his Jurassic Park and its sequels. We have reviewed his The Lost World, a sequel to Jurassic Park, before.
Congo is one of his earlier works. Let us talk about the story first.
Jan Kruger, the local expert is hired as a guide to lead the geological team of US into the densest of the Congo forests, the unexplored Virunga region.
It is funny how, in this book written in 1980, Chrichton says that ‘what used to be called Congo is now Zaire’!
They are after diamonds, not for their value, as they are so impure as to be worthless, but for their electrical properties. (They are geologists after all, not entrepreneurs or adventurers). The book starts explosively, with the “bone crusher” attacking and killing them all, but what did you expect in a Michael Crichton book?
Dr Peter Elliot is trying to teach Amy, a pet female gorilla, to communicate based on previous ( and what looks like real) evidence that they can learn. She has learned a modified version of the sign language and seems to be able to communicate her thoughts and wants. When she “views” ancient ruins in Congo in a dream, he knows he has to take her there.
He convinces Ross, the researcher and the female interest in the story, to take him and Amy. The Consortium, a multinational competitor to Ross’s client who wants to find the beryllium mines before they do, are already on the move. They may even reach the site before Ross’s team (including Peter Elliot and Amy). They bid for Captain Munro with the Consortium right there in the room!
The team finds that the Consortium has been intercepting their data and that the “gorilla” that destroyed the previous camp could be a brand new species. Consortium’s effort to kidnap Amy fails as Ross has put tracer inside it previously and finds it fast.
They are shot at in Congo and decide to jump out of the plane, Amy and all.
The old age of the plot shows. Think about this – A highly sophisticated computer with 189K memory! Those were simple times….
They visit a pygmy village where an ERTS old team member is met. Then they go through a white water rapids to reach their destination. They find people had been killed with their skulls crushed by a gorilla-like animal with an odd grey fur.
They find bodies crushed with stone paddles and come to the realization that there is a kind of gorilla “that is not gorilla” (Amy’s definition) that lurks there.
The grey gorillas launch a ferocious attack on the camp and are foiled the first night. When Elliot goes to capture one of them to learn their ‘language’ (since they seem intelligent) he falls in their midst and is saved in the nick of time by Amy.
The satellite communication fails due to solar flairs and they are left with no power of computers in US to back them up. They are almost overpowered and killed by the trained (to be killers) gorilla troop when the artificial warning Elliot had made studying their language makes them go away. They finally find the diamonds but Ross ignores and hides warning from her own base station to abort and return.
The mountain erupts and then, from that point on, the story seems to be written only to finish it, as if suddenly the author lost all interest in the subject and was unable to wait to finish it properly. Fairly annoying.
Not a bad story but a little bit too thinly woven. The sophistication in the later works like Jurassic Park is also somehow missing. Entertaining, but just that.
5/10
– – Krishna