Next by Michael Crichton

NEXT

Next. Michael Crichton needs a good editor. I remember reading that once in a critic's description of PD James' book "Devices and Desires" and I had to agree at the time. It is also painfully clear here in Next.

Not even his most vociferous fans would call him a good writer. I don't think they would anyway. He's usually a fine plotter, inventive, provocative and knows how to keep the pages turning but the actual written word is not his forte. When I read his books I picture how they'd look on the screen and that's where most of them end up. He knows what sells and reliably produces it. I think that's a good thing in a writer, to know what one is capable of and what one's audiences want to read.

Jurassic Park was a triumph in the Michael Crichton school of writing. The cardboard characters in that book actually propelled the plot along smoothly and I stayed up late into the night to finish and even recommended it to my less bookish family members. It was a hit with them all.

Next is no Jurassic Park. It is even choppier than his usual fare with short chapters that are almost, to me, haphazard in their beginnings and endings. My thought while reading was Crichton was attempting to do without transitions of any sort just to see if he could do it. Well, he can't. The reader can fill in only so much.

I've never minded that Crichton's characters were author-directed puppets with little to distinguish them as individuals - that's not the point of reading his novels. The characters in Next, however, are barely limned in; to say even that they were caricatures would be giving the book too much credit. He has two child characters named Jamie, similarly threatened, and you don't know there is a reason for the matching names until the last third of the book. Even when I did know the reason I suspected it was an afterthought although it is easy enough to replace characters' names --- see the comment about editing above.

About the plot: there are evil, mean scientists and there are good and true scientists. There are very bad business-people and there are some caught up in the happenstance of life. All of the characters, the pure and the not so pure, are involved in using gene research to classify people and to practice eugenics, to create transgenic animals and to exploit or protect them. This wreaks the predictable havoc. I noticed even the person who wrote the description of the inside flap of the book seemed at a loss to describe it.

The theme of the book, as he tells us in the afterword, is this: Stop patenting genes. I think it is an admirable goal and I support him in it. I recommend the bibliography. However, I wish he'd written a better work of fiction instead of a barely disguised screed. Even Crichton can write better than this.

Melanie