STATE OF FEAR
By Michael Crichton
HarperCollins, $36.95, 624 pages
REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER
Michael Crichton has written his share of thrillers, including “The Andromeda Strain” and “Jurassic Park.” And now he has come up with another one, “State of Fear,” which is a typical Crichton potboiler, except that it isn’t.
As a novel, or rather a melodrama, “State of Fear” is flawed and I’ll get to that in a minute. But Mr. Crichton’s purpose with the book is only incidentally to entertain. What he is trying to do — and succeeds quite well — is use a work of fiction to throw ice water on the theory of global warming that has people who should know better, such as British Prime Minister Tony Blair, in a tizzie for fear that the ice is about to melt.
“State of Fear” is more than the title of the book; it is, as Mr. Crichton eventually gets around to telling us, the atmosphere in which all of us live. More on that later, too.
In effect, then, Mr. Crichton is attempting to do three things: Explode what he sees as the myth of global warming, explain why a good chunk of the civilized world accepts as fact not only global warming but also the theory that it’s caused by too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and, finally, at the same time write a thriller in which the perils faced by the leading characters would put Pauline of “The Perils of Pauline” to shame.
True, nobody gets tied up and left on the railroad tracks with the train coming, but it’s only because Mr. Crichton didn’t think of it.
Take one of the novel’s heroines, Sarah Jones and her escapades in a period of about seven weeks as an example. Not counting the times she is shot at — and missed — Sarah’s perils include falling into a crevasse in the ice in Antarctica, climbing out only to freeze almost to death, being struck by lightning, nearly drowning in a flash flood, coming within an ace of being eaten alive and raw by cannibals and, as a climax, barely escaping a man-induced tsunami. (Amazingly, Mr. Crichton somehow managed to anticipate the recent big one in the Indian Ocean.)
Sarah’s lawyer friend, Peter Evans, doesn’t fare much better. He falls into the crevasse with her, almost freezes with her, nearly drowns with her, escapes the cannibals and the tsunami with her. But he is on hand to revive her after she is hit by lightning and he rescues her from the flash flood.
She, on the other hand, is not around when three of the bad guys hold him down and force a tiny poisonous octopus to bite him. He survives, but only because he’s one of the good guys.
Other melodramatic cliches are here, too. One of the good guys, presumed dead in a wreck in California, shows up alive in the Solomon Islands just in time to rescue his buddies from the cannibals by (and where have you read this before?) using his machete to hack his way through the back side of a grass hut.
Of course, one of the good guys turns out to be a bad guy and the chief villain, true to the format of any melodrama, pretends to be a good guy but it takes about two early-on sentences for us to learn he’s really a bad guy.
The hero — sort of — is not just another guy but an Olympics caliber skier who also happens to be a genius. He’s a kind of a Lone Ranger type and his Tonto is not an American Indian but Nepalese. They ride to the rescue, not on horses named Silver and Scout, but with computers and on jet planes and helicopters. They’re tougher than the Lone Ranger. They shoot to kill.
The plot? Oh, yes, the plot. It has to do with an environmental organization, the National Environmental Resource Fund, NERF for short, run by (wouldn’t you know it) an ex-lawyer named Nicholas Drake.
Drake is riding the global warming craze for all he is worth, putting out phony information and juggling statistics to prove that global warming is a serious threat and that it is caused by the huge amounts of carbon dioxide spewed into the atmosphere by the industrially advanced nations, mainly the evil United States.
He is planning to create four man-made catastrophes that will seem to be global warming at work. His purpose is to raise money by convincing rich suckers that they must contribute to his organization’s efforts to put an end to global warming before all the ice melts, sea levels rise catastrophically, tsunamis strike and hurricanes multiply, among other things.
Oh yes, along with his four events, the villain is also supporting a suit against the Environmental Protection Agency by the teeny South Pacific Island nation of Vanutu (population 8,000) that allegedly is facing extinction from rising sea levels caused by global warming.
To the rescue of all that is good and sensible come the Lone Ranger aka Richard Kenner (nowhere known as Dick) and his Nepalese sidekick Tonto, also know as Sanjong Thapa (no kidding). They are secret agents working for a supersecret agency.
While their job is to thwart the wicked Nicholas Drake they take time out to educate or at least try to educate Peter and Sarah, a couple of dumb — really dumb — celebrities who have been captured by Drake, and a super rich contributor to environmental causes, George Morton.
After Morton catches on he fakes a fatal wreck for reasons I still haven’t figured out, disappears and shows up at the grass hut in the nick of time. Well, almost the nick of time. The cannibals have already eaten one of their captives.
For reasons that Mr. Crichton does not explain Kenner and Sanjong Thapa (everyone calls him Sanjong) insist on taking Peter and Sarah with them on their dangerous missions to all the novel’s exotic places — the South Pole, Arizona and the Solomons. It seems to me that all they do is get in the way. But somebody has to have narrow escapes and Kenner and Sanjong are too smart to get into real trouble very often.
As I said earlier, Mr. Crichton’s purpose is only incidentally to write an adventure story. The novel is an excuse for him to present facts, figures, charts and footnotes laying to rest the proposition that the earth is heating up, the ice is melting and that disaster looms.
Among the facts Mr. Crichton marshals to make his case are these: The warmest year between l880 and 2000 was 1934. The island nation of Iceland, far from warming, is cooling. Although the Antarctic Peninsula is warming the continent of Antarctica as a whole is cooling and its ice thickening.
There are more, including: During the last four interglacial periods the earth was warmer than it is today. Cities are warmer than the country because of buildings, pavement and people. Many stations that measure temperatures that were once in the country are now surrounded by city which accounts for their increased temperature readings.
Mr. Crichton has a theory regarding the spread of such theories as global warming. He puts his theory in the mouth of the not-as-nutty-as-he-seems Professor Norman Hoffman who calls it the Politico-Legal-Media Complex, PLM forshort. PLM, which consists of most of the world’s politicians, lawyers and journalists, is dedicated to spreading fear throughout the world.
Hoffman notes, perhaps with some accuracy, that with the end of the Cold War the PLF needed a new fear and settled on global warming. “This,” he asserts, “is the way modern society works — by the constant creation of fear” by the “ravenous machine” that is the PLM. To which, he adds, “There is no countervailing force.”
As a result, Hoffman says, “fear pervades society in all its aspects.”
That, of course, leads us back to the title of Mr. Crichton’s book, “State of Fear.” The fear, in this case brought on and manipulated by the news media, by lawyers and most of all by Nicholas Drake, is the fear of global warming.
The book aside, in today’s world that fear is not fictional; it is real and pervasive, helped along by the ongoing efforts of the PLM. What Mr. Crichton has attempted to do and, in spite of the novel’s flaws, has done rather well, is allay those fears by using verifiable facts and figures to get at the truth and expose the fraud of global warming for what it is.
One can only guess at whether he will succeed in the real world. In the world of fiction, however, we are luckier.
There Kenner has already saved us from those manmade “natural” disasters perpetrated by Drake and as the book ends we are left feeling confident that the newly wised-up George Morton, abetted by the Lone Ranger Kenner and his faithful companion Sanjong Tonto, is going to spend the rest of his life — and money — applying serious heat to the bad guys of global warming.
Hi Yo, Silver! Awaaay!
Lyn Nofziger, a Washington writer, was an adviser to President Ronald Reagan.
Please read our comment policy before commenting.