The Lost Realm

I normally enjoy a Michael Crichton novel, relishing escaping into the thrilling almost science fiction of some of his earlier works such as: Jurassic Park, The Lost World, Timeline, Sphere, and Congo.  However, this one left me a bit dizzy, trying to piece together the separate, unrelated view points into a cohesive plot line.  It tries to come off like the movie Snatch, separate seemingly unconnected view points that over the course of the story show a relation that heightens each individual story, but falls short of that goal.

Instead it reads more like a collection of author notes on varying elements of genetics and bio-engineering pieced together to try and represent the author’s views on the topic.  The pieces that are there are fairly well written, but a number of the characters come off as shallow and poorly represented.  I also found that a number of the story arcs weren’t closed to my satisfaction and left me wondering what the point of that arc in general was.

If you’re curious about genetics or bio-engineering, you may thoroughly enjoy reading the author’s view points in this fictional representation, otherwise you may find this to be a waste of your time.

I did enjoy the story arcs involving the two transgenetic creatures.  Dave the Humanzee and Gerard the Human/Parrot hybrid, though while Dave at least has a prominent role in what I considered to be the main story arc (see below), Gerard unfortunately seemed almost as filler meant to entertain the reader but serving no real purpose to the overall story.

From what I could glean from the book the main story arc revolves around a gene dispute between Biogen and a man whose cells produce a potential cure to cancer after a treatment he received to cure his rare form of leukaemia.  The university that treated him took samples of his cells and without his authorization for commercial use sold these to the highest bidder (Biogen).  As a result, Biogen declares ownership of the cell line, including those within Mr. Burnet and his family.  Following sabotage of Biogen’s copy of the cell line, they  set out to try and reclaim the cells using a Bounty Hunter.