There, Crichton eschews deep dives into history and science, and the book is lacking. Compare this to his much weaker John Lange novel “Easy Go,” also about an African adventure (albeit in the Egyptian desert).
Those pauses in the story are worth it, because the story gets enriched. Crichton repeats his “Andromeda Strain” method of giving us a little bit of story, then a little bit of researched, real-world context. “Congo” has the feel of stumbling into classic status. Africans serve as porters on the trek and also as Red Shirts, to borrow the “Star Trek” term for the undeveloped characters who are most likely to be killed. I like how Munro quickly takes to Amy, often indulging her requests to be tickled. Peter Elliot (most often the POV character) is Amy’s caretaker, Karen Ross is a driven young field scientist, and Munro is a rugged guide with a softer side. The human leads, meanwhile, each have one core trait. He notes that the jungle only covers a small portion of Africa, yet even the jungle is massive, with many micro-environments where uncatalogued flora are found - and even uncatalogued fauna, something that becomes “Congo’s” tense mystery thread.Ĭharacter-wise, we get Crichton’s most pop-off-the-page personality up to this point: Amy, the 7-year-old sign-language-using gorilla. The author makes that famous point about how flat maps (which scrunch the equatorial regions and expand as you go toward the poles) make us underestimate how huge the continent is. Narratively, “Congo” follows a 1979 African expedition that boasts high-tech camping, defense and communications gear while also tapping into the spirit of 19 th century expeditions, because Africa is still so vast and mysterious. It’s a sneaky man-versus-nature novel, seemingly less focused than his other techno-thrillers but still achieving a powerful theme about how nature dwarfs us and will bury us in the end as it has all previous fossils and architectural ruins. In “The Andromeda Strain,” Michael Crichton detailed nature’s microscopic but serious threat to mankind, and in “Congo” (1980) – his best novel up to this point – he illustrates nature’s worldwide threat to mankind.
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