The Lost World - Michael Crichton (Abridged Audiobook)

Listened to: May 2010 (at age 32)

First time listened to.  I think I read the book back somewhere about 1993.  It didn’t make much of an impression then, if I did.

If you haven’t read it:

This is a pretty straight-forward monster-thriller starring dinosaurs in the lead villain role.  A sequel to Jurassic Park, it stars only one of the same characters – Ian Malcolm - (I wonder if they only brought back the one actor for the movie?)  It’s fast paced, there’s tension, but it wasn’t one of Crichton’s better efforts.  I don’t know how much of that is due to the abridging – I remember the dead tree edition being a pretty hefty volume, and it got pared down to just 4 hours of reading.  

If you’ve heard it (spoilers!)

Overall:

This book was a pretty straightforward thriller, and suffered greatly from being a sequel.  The formula seemed to have been copied from Jurassic Park: Strong male lead? Check.  Strong female lead?  Check.  Kids for the grown-ups to protect?  Check boy, and check girl.  Dinos?  Yup, got them too. What it didn’t have was the same intelligence and plausibility of the original.  This one felt like all the dinosaurs wanted to do was kill the people, which is too bad.  Oh, and the moralization at the end didn’t help the book at all.

Rating: 2

Characterization:

Weak.  I got more out of the characters from the voice the reader used than from the writing.  Since it was a male reader who used a whiny falsetto for the female characters and kids, they suffered as a result.  The only characters who I saw any motivations for were Richard Levine, because he was at least obsessed, and Sarah Harding, who studies large predators, and would be expected to be interested in the dinos.  The rest?  I couldn’t really tell why they were there at all. 

Actually, that’s not completely true.  The kids were there to be threatened and kidnapped by dinos.  Since we have a strong female lead, someone needs to be the “damsel in distress”.  Someone needed to be the strong, competent male – enter Doc Thorne.  And so on.  The characters felt like servants to the plot.

Many of the characters were annoying for several reasons – Levine because he was so clueless and whiny, Harding because she was way to obviously there as a role model to smart girls everywhere, a few of the others – Kelly, Arby, Eddie – because of the voice chosen by the reader. 

Premise:  

Weak.  The notion of a “Site B”, or second location overrun with dinosaurs was just fine, but I couldn’t handle that the supposedly very bright characters would do so many dumb things in order to be threatened so constantly.  One example:  why would they outfit trailers and trucks when there’s no likelihood of roads where they area probably going? 

Setting:   

Strong.  Dinosaurs make wonderful bad guys, and the tropical island makes for a great descriptions and dramatic scenes.

Plot:  

Weak.  It pretty much consisted of get into trouble, run away from the dinosaurs.  Do this as a group, then as individuals.  Have a few people get eaten to reinforce the seriousness of the situation.  Fail a few times, and then get away.  Not that unusual for a thriller, but not strong. 

Readability:  

Good.  Oh, it flowed just fine.  Probably the most important part of a thriller is the pacing.  There was about the right amount of tension at the right places to keep me going.  It was between listening sessions where most of the “wait, what?” moments happened for me.

Audiobook reader:  

Ok-to-weak.  I liked the voices for several of the characters, and I didn’t like several others.  The narration wasn’t consistent, and I thought that the reading style tried to force tension were there really wasn’t any.  The voices got mixed up, occasionally.  It was much better than listening to someone with no inflection, but several times I got knocked out of the story because the tone didn’t jibe with the words.