Sunday, February 20, 2011

Next by Michael Crichton
Harper Collins, 431 pages

It would be a monumental task to give an adequate synopsis of Next, the last of Mr. Crichton's works published within his lifetime. Like the human genome, the subject of the book, this book is a labyrinth, with an elaborate list of character and plot threads. It exists in a world where various individuals and corporations fight to interpret, patent and exploit our genes. Their attempts lead to both comic and frightening results, from creating parrots who can hold down conversations to pursuing patients whose cells have been legally declared someone else's property.


This is certainly not the best of Mr. Crichton's work - the prose is simplistic to the point of laziness and the story dawdles too much with unnecessary characters. Still, in many ways the novel completes the themes Crichton began with his 1980 novel "Congo" and continued in "Jurassic Park" and "The Lost World". In all these works, humanity's attempts to toy with Mother Nature leads to violent results. In Next, however, Mr. Crichton turns this theme on its head. The two created species of the book - a hyper-intelligent parrot and a human/chimpanzee hybird - both want nothing more then to integrate peacefully into our society.

In Congo and the two Jurassic Park novels, it is the new species who run wild, causing mayhem and death. In Next, it is humanity itself which has run amok. Very few social crimes go unexplored in this novel, whose vast cast of characters include pedophiles, rapists, body snatchers, drug addicts, scheming housewives, crooked lawyers, crooked doctors and that staple of any Crichton novel, the corporate thief. The novel has few heros, with the possible exception of Alex Burnet, the lawyer who goes on the run after a crooked company decides that since they own her father's cells, they own her cells as well.

It is this change in theme which ultimately makes Next a disturbing novel. In past books, humanity has accidentally created monsters, but those monsters can still be destroyed. Here, the monsters are ourselves and no amount of gene therapy is ever going to change it. Rather then look to science to solve humanity's woes, Mr. Crichton seems to be implying that the "next" thing we need to do is step back and look deeply into ourselves.

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