THERE are few appealing characters in Next, the latest techno-thriller from Michael Crichton, but readers will warm to Dave, the “humanzee” product of an illicit transgenic experiment. Smuggled from a primate research facility by his human “father”, Dave loves his new family. The suburbs of southern California are, however, no place for a boy who is part-human, part-chimp – especially one whose response to a school bully is to climb a fence and throw excrement.
Like Dave, Next is an uncomfortable hybrid. In this assault on the commercialisation of biomedicine, Crichton takes some liberties in blending fact and fantasy. Lightly fictionalised accounts of genuine controversies are interspersed with mock news reports, some describing real people and events. Yet with improbable transgenic protagonists like Dave and Gerard – essentially a precocious child trapped in a parrot’s body – there should be no mistaking this novel for a work of docu-fiction.
If the cover blurb is any guide, though, such ambiguity is exactly what Crichton was striving for. “This is not the world of the future – this is the world of right now,” we are told. How many novels other than Crichton’s recent offerings conclude with an “author’s note” detailing policy recommendations? Together with the extensive bibliography, this suggests that Crichton sees Next as a serious commentary on the dangers posed by contemporary biotechnology.
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By now, you may be dreading a rerun of State of Fear, Crichton’s breathtakingly arrogant dismissal of global warming as a conspiracy theory. That novel, too, was embellished with a bibliography and author’s message – which was lapped up by critics of action to combat climate change.
“It is a shame that Crichton buys into the hype surrounding gene transfer”
While Next also has many flaws, it should prove less controversial. As a journalist whose beat overlaps with the novel’s subject matter, I found much in it that I recognised, from the “bodysnatchers” caught raiding corpses for tissues to sell for use in surgery to the strange tale of a “bio-artist” charged by overzealous prosecutors with plotting bioterrorism. Crichton also tackles some important issues, notably the commodification of human genes and tissues and the blurring of the boundary between academic and commercial biomedicine. I share some of his concerns, which is perhaps why I found Next so frustrating. There is a good book in here struggling to get out, but Crichton seems so enamoured with his background research that he threw the whole lot at his word processor to avoid losing a single juicy anecdote.
Summarising this disjointed novel is almost impossible. Next is strongest when Crichton takes the time to develop plot lines that personalise the issues at hand. The pursuit of a lawyer and her child by bounty hunters intent on taking biopsies from their tissues to recover a biotech firm’s intellectual property is an engaging device.
Mostly the chapters whiz past at breakneck speed, continually introducing new characters who fuse into a composite of dismal venality. Too often, proliferating sub-plots share the same fate as Gerard the transgenic parrot – who proves so annoying that he is ejected from a car and left lost and flapping in the middle of nowhere.
There are also sloppy errors. Some examples: embryonic stem cells are not found in umbilical cord blood; the glowing protein beloved of genetic engineers is GFP, not GPF; and African grey parrots, while reasonably intelligent, have not been shown to recognise their own reflections. In the faux news items, at least, Crichton has a get-out – perhaps he is satirising the ignorance of my profession. But one would expect someone who wears his bibliography on his sleeve to take more care.
From the standpoint of credibility, a bigger problem for me is that Crichton cannot resist some trademark science-run-amok. So alongside the sentient transgenic hybrids, we have drug addicts cured by a “maturity” gene, which then causes them to age prematurely. Dave and Gerard at least provide comic relief.
Given the wealth of material at his disposal, it is a shame that Crichton buys into the hype surrounding gene transfer, which if it worked so readily would already be routine. In truth, gene therapists are mostly running aground rather than running amok.
All in all, what Next needed was a tough edit. That would have been no easy job, given a superstar author who now seems to believe his own publicity.
Next
HarperCollins
