Greetings, bibliophiles.
Today, I’m very excited to bring you
.Matthew writes
, where he explores life and culture through literature and cinema.Here, Matthew does just that, by taking a deeper look at the book that gave a semblance of order to the chaos of his life as a young boy in a foreign (and rainy!) land — Jurassic Park. Enjoy!
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In the mid-nineties, everyone was mad for the Mesozoic. A wave of dino-mania had begun a decade earlier, Michael Crichton had written two novels about genetically engineered dinosaurs, and one of the most famous directors of all time had turned them into films. However, I knew nothing about any of this yet, nor did I know I was about to discover the book that would dominate my adolescent reading.
Back then, I was ten years old, and I’d been forced to pack up a few toys and clothes to make the journey with my family halfway across the planet. We moved from the mountainous, fully seasonal west coast of Canada to England, a country with two seasons: raining, and raining less.1 I left my whole life behind, saying goodbye to beloved family members and all my friends. Almost as soon as we arrived in this foreign land, my parents divorced. I felt stranded, powerless, alone. Like many kids in such a way, the local library became a safe haven. Its rows of alphabetised books made sense amidst the apparent senselessness of life, and the books themselves offered meaningful plots and tidy endings. In a book, I could escape the chaos of the real world.
The book I escaped into more times than any other, by a factor of an easy hundred, was Jurassic Park by Michael Crichton. I can’t remember the first time I read it, probably because once I’d found it on that library shelf, I read and re-read it so often that it felt like it had always been part of my life. No doubt the global phenomenon of Spielberg’s film adaptation made me reach for the book that first time, but it was the story that had me coming back to it over and over again.
The novel’s plot is well known to anyone over the age of ten, but beyond the premise of a dinosaur theme park in which the creatures escape and terrorise the park’s guests, it is a book about humanity’s efforts to dominate nature. The book explores how control is often an illusion intended to soothe us of the pain caused by life’s chaos. While the park’s owner is convinced he can sublimate nature to his whims, Ian Malcolm – rock star mathematician and advocate of chaos theory – argues that “the island will quickly proceed to behave in unpredictable fashion”.
Protected from some of the buffeting of life’s stormy seas by a lifeboat made of books, I was soon drawn to the idea of writing my own stories. No doubt I thought I could write a sense of meaning and order onto the complexities of life. I wanted to control something, anything, as I suffered the tribulations of puberty and the trial of my parents’ divorce while simultaneously adjusting to being a stranger in a strange land.
Jurassic Park showed me the kind of book I might want to write. In the year after first reading it, I wrote countless copy-cat versions of Crichton’s novel. I littered my own renditions with sentences lifted from the original text, phrases that appealed to my incipient sensibilities as a writer. I was an amateur mimicking an expert to work out how it’s done. Crichton’s novel also made me want to be a palaeontologist. Like Bruce Wayne and Batman, I thought I would dig up bones by day and write novels by night.
Looking back now, I have no doubt that my pride at being able to recite obscure facts about palaeontology was about feeling bigger and more capable than I was. I felt the same about my ability to sculpt a story out of language. In year seven, my English teacher would point to me when a student asked for the spelling of a word and say, “Ask the human dictionary.” I loved that. It made me feel just as precocious, just as special, to have read at that young age a book that was officially taxonomized as “for adults”.
There might be more to it than just feeling clever for one’s age. In Jurassic Park, fossil hunter Alan Grant has a theory about why young children learn the phonetically-contorted names of dinosaurs – it is “a way of exerting power over the giants” that symbolise their parents. Grant believes that dinosaurs “personified the uncontrollable force of looming authority”, and if kids can name them, they can tame them. Of course, the grown-up experts in the novel know far more about dinosaurs, but that knowledge can’t save them from the predations of carnivores who don’t care how smart these humans are. There are limits to what we can control.
Jurassic Park also reminds us of our limits when Crichton makes grand declarations about the science of his time, which turn out in the light of hindsight to be wrong. There are, for example, chapters fretting about paleontological disputes of the nineties that have since been resolved, and there’s something heartening about this. It’s reassuring to be reminded that life (as Malcolm argues in the book) is unpredictable. It’s good to be reminded that just as anxieties about the printing press, monster movies, or fax machines once mattered then faded away, some of our present concerns will also vanish in time.
If I could speak to my childhood self, I’d tell him that much of what he’s worried about (our parents’ divorce, living in a new country, struggling to make friends) will vanish in time. Life will be chaotic because, as Jurassic Park shows, life is chaos. I would remind him that the message of his favourite book is that the attempt to control everything is doomed to failure. Resist the urge to be in control, and avoid the hubris of Dr Wu, head scientist at Jurassic Park, who says of the dinosaurs:
“These animals are genetically engineered to be unable to survive in the real world. They can only live here in Jurassic Park. They are not free at all. They are essentially our prisoners.”
Be more like Malcolm, who gives a wry smile and says (to be quoted by readers and fans of the film until the end of time): “Life will find a way.”
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Editor’s note: As an Englishman, I can confirm this fact as 100% true.
The iconic nature of the movie overshadows how enjoyable this book is. The only thing the movie missed was to let John Hammond get nipped to death by compys.
Sorry that I haven’t read it. Having read this article, I plan to remedy this soon !