tracesauveur 's review for:

Congo by Michael Crichton

3.0

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Crichton is obviously a big fan of filling his novels with extremely specific technological and scientific detail; this feels like the first of his I’ve read where the plot practically exists solely to indulge in absurdly protracted descriptions of stuff like militaristic and private research weapons/location/communications systems, geographic and topographical characteristics, the social patterns of various jungle animals but especially gorillas, and a bunch of other tertiary tangents that in may cases only minorly supplement the story in any meaningful way. That said, it’s fun to read and I have an admiration for a book whose author has no misgivings about narrative and characterization taking a back seat to his single-minded fixations. Crichton would have been a great technical writer.