Book Review: Congo by Michael Crichton

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Heeeeere's Amy! 


Picture this. It's 1980. I'm not even alive yet. The hair is continuing to defy gravity. Computers and technology are out there, but they're remarkably slow. You're still almost a half decade away from AOL and the fabulous dial up internet. Michael Crichton decided to write a technology-heavy book about killer gorillas and the search for diamonds in the Congo.

Big-congo.jpgDudes, I just finished this book, and I still don't understand Crichton's need for diamonds. It's got something to do with technology, and powering things? I'll admit I skimmed a lot of the rambling bits when he really got going about the tech stuff.

Congo, as an adventure read, was fun. I am all for really smart gorillas tearing humans to bits. Amy, the good gorilla who joins our plucky (and obnoxious) adventurers on their quest to discover what happened to the first team, is a fun character, who drinks cocktails and smokes cigars (even though she's a gorilla?), and displays more human characteristics than gorilla ones. I enjoyed the character of Munroe, the merc-for-hire. Everyone else was kind of eh. Quite frankly I'm a bit bummed some of them made it through the novel. It would have been much more satisfying to have them turned into jelly by huge meaty gorilla hands.

The one catch on this novel, which made it both even more entertaining and also not great, was the technology. It is INCREDIBLY tech heavy, from how they get through the jungle, their communication to the outside, to how they stay alive against outside forces. As someone reading this book for the first time in 2019, I was thrown by how antiquated everything was. It's part of why it was great, though. Looking at people who had to wrt txt lk ths because they didn't have enough space for vowels in their messages.

Crichton continues to delight. I gave this one 4 out of 5 stars, because it was really engaging and held my interest, despite the rambly bits.
Recommend if you're into action adventure stories, human-like apes, and jungle settings. Do not recommend if gorrillas freak out you, you got really, really mad at images taking a long time to load on computers in the 90's, or you require a strong female lead.

Love,
Lady P.


Comments

  1. Justin GraysJuly 19, 2019 at 11:14 AM

    You know, I had forgotten that Congo was a book before it was a movie (granted, the movie came out almost 25 years ago, and I haven't really thought about it much since I stopped watching VHS on a regular basis). Not that I got around to watching the movie - I just remember all of the adverts for it; Paramount Pictures had quite the "BUY NOW ON VHS" thing going on its cassette tapes at the time.

    The trailers for the movie made me not interested in reading the book, to be honest - this take on it has made me reconsider that decision. Revisiting the time around my birth (I was born in '83, so not that far off from it) will be an interesting adventure.

    Thank you for these reviews! I love seeing them.

    ReplyDelete

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