I'm not sure how many of you watched David Attenborough's Natural History Museum Alive TV programme around New Year's, but if you didn't, you should. It was brilliant - David Attenborough wandering around the Kensington museum as various exhibits came to life. That prompted a conversation with a historian friend of mine about Richard Owen, the man that set up the museum in the first place... which led to me dragging this book down from my TBR.
Summary: In The Dinosaur Hunters, Deborah Cadbury brilliantly recreates the remarkable story of the bitter rivalry between two men: Gideon Mantell uncovered giant bones in a Sussex quarry, became obsessed with the lost world of the reptiles and was driven to despair. Richard Owen, a brilliant anatomist, gave the extinct creatures their name and secured for himself unrivalled international acclaim.
First off, this is not really a book about dinosaurs. Obviously they feature significantly, but the focus of the book is about the key players in the fossil and bone discoveries (the titular hunters of the dinosaurs, one may assume). It's about their squabbles, outrages and hysterical fits as new scientific discoveries challenge the previously held Creationist views.
There are two camps - those who believe in evolution (although not necessarily referred to as such) and those who believe that view is blasphemous and some creatures are extinct because they were wiped out by the Deluge (Noah's flood). I should clarify that both of these groups are scientists. Educated men. All scientific schools of the time taught that God created the Earth as if it were Fact, so suddenly claiming that this may not be quite true was almost earth-shattering.
What amazed me was the many attempts to alter science to fit in with religion, not the other way round. Theories were dismissed by leading scientists, simply on the basis that it didn't fit in with the Bible. Not because they didn't want to create an uproar, but because they believed the Bible was fact.
I'm not saying these things so we can all have a hearty laugh at religion - it just shocked me that there was such a huge backlash. Apparently the very fact that the dinosaurs had carnivorous teeth contravened God - theoretically reptiles were Created before Man (in Genesis), but meat-eating and killing only began after Adam sinned, so therefore the dinosaurs (pre-Adam) should not have needed meat teeth!
Buckland was concerned to explain why the Creator chose to fill the primitive world with evil carnivorous beasts. His very own evidence showed that the reptilian carnivores were furnished with 'organs for the purpose of capturing and killing their prey, instruments formed expressly for destruction'; Nature was hideously red in tooth and claw. He accepted that this was 'inconsistent with a Creation founded in Benevolence and tending to produce the greatest amount of enjoyment to the greatest number of individuals.' Nonetheless, he sought to reconcile even this to God's wisdom.
Obviously I find this quite interesting... but I still had a problem connecting with The Dinosaur Hunters. It's written well, but very formally and with a huge amount of information-dumping. There's a lot of discussion about different rock types that I didn't understand but also had zero interest in. It's a heavy book that was occasionally difficult to follow.
I do appreciate the thoroughness of the research, quotes and discussion and perhaps it isn't aimed at a person with only a casual understanding of geology. The fact remains though that I struggled to want to pick up the book after I'd put it down. I wanted to have the knowledge it offered - I just didn't want to go through trying to read the damn thing.
To be fair, it does liven up towards the end, when both scientists are academically established and have moved on to a rivalry over actual dinosaurs instead of squabbling incomprehensibly over rock types. I was actually genuinely irate about Richard Owen's behaviour towards the work of other scientists. I know we have him to thank for the Natural History Museum, but that doesn't mean I have to like the man.
The end chapter which introduces Darwin, and therefore the downfall of Richard Owen, is wonderful. Natural selection and the concept than men evolved from primates was hugely shocking to Victorian England, especially as scientists like Owen had worked hard to ensure that God was still prevalent in Natural History.Deborah Cadbury paints a perfect picture of a desperate old man, scrabbling to keep hold of the reputation he forged by belittling others. It's actually quite moving and I felt the dredges of sympathy for him.
To conclude, this is a fairly heavy and frequently dry explanation of the rivalry between Richard Owen and Gideon Mantel. It is very, very thorough and yet still assumes that you already know a certain about about geological strata (as an example). It becomes slightly easier towards the end and it's worth reading just for the last third of the book, which is very good indeed. This isn't a casual book but it is interesting.
I got this out from the library way back in February and I was absolutely desperate to read it. You know, champing at the bit, frothing at the mouth, clawing at the windows type desperate. We'd just watched the film for the first time in years, and I think I fell in love with it even more than I did the first time. I just loved it and it made me so ridiculously happy that I clicked straight onto the library catalogue and reserved myself a copy of the novel. And then didn't read it for three months, obviously.
On a remote jungle island, genetic engineers have created a dinosaur game park.
An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been discovered. Now one of mankind's most thrilling fantasies has come true and the first dinosaurs that the Earth has seen in the time of man emerge.
But, as always, there is a dark side to the fantasy and after a catastrophe destroys the park's defense systems, the scientists and tourists are left fighting for survival...
I loved the book even more than the movie, once I'd eventually got round to reading it. They changed quite a lot for the big screen, especially character-wise (Jeff Goldblum's role in particular) and it was fascinating to work out which was original and which was Steven Spielberg. There's one change in particular that means I'm not going to be able to watch any of the three films again without ranting. It's a huge, huge change and I need somebody else to read it so I can rant! Certain iconic scenes are identical though - T-Rex overturning cars in the rain, anyone?
It's a lot more serious and scientific than the film. The explanation behind the DNA-ing process (clearly I've picked up a lot of the terminology) is much more in-depth and there's a lot of dinosaur facts inserted neatly into the text. At the same time, you never feel like you're actually learning. As so many of the characters are palaeontologists or botanists, it feels so natural for them to be talking in that way. It even ventures into the philosophical at times - Dr. Malcolm in particular is very keen on chaos theory, which he (frequently) uses to explain how he believes Jurassic Park is doomed to fail. There doesn't seem to be as much action in the book, but then it makes up for it with rational, thought-out discussion and tense atmosphere.
However, that doesn't mean I didn't want to feed any of the characters to a dinosaur. Lexy, for example. I'd have rescued the goat and chained her to the post instead. In the book, it's actually the girl child that's younger - apparently Steven Spielberg liked Joseph Mazello so much that he switched the fictional children's ages round so that he could play the boy. But anyway. She's honestly the one thing I'd have changed about Jurassic Park - she's just so whiny and god-damned annoying. She doesn't care about dinosaurs and constantly informs her brother that their father loves her more. Charming. Stabbity stab stab.
But now science is the belief system that is hundreds of years old. And, like the medieval system before it, science is starting not to fit the world any more. Science has attained so much power that its practical limits begin to be apparent. Largely through science, billions of us live in one small world, densely packed and intercommunicating. But science cannot help us decide what to do with that world, or how to live. Science can make a nuclear reactor, but it cannot tell us not to build it. Science can make pesticide, but cannot tell us not to use it. And our world starts to seem polluted in fundamental ways---air, and water, and land---because of ungovernable science.
The atmosphere in this book is just incredible though. You can practically feel the dinosaurs (seriously, every single time I've written that word in this review, I've accidentally typed 'spiders' first. Which sucks because Arachnid Park wouldn't be half as exciting) breathing down your neck. It's tense, exciting and I was on the edge of my seat, half expecting a spider dinosaur to take a bite out of me at any moment.
That said, it's nowhere near as gory as I expected it to be. If it were a film (which it is, obviously), I'd probably give it a PG, or 12 at a push. There's a few moments that made me go 'Eww!' but nothing to do with humans and nothing even remotely memorable. Basically, if you can put on your big girl panties to watch the movie, you can cope with the book.
Long story short, I really really loved Jurassic Park. It's even better than the film and I can't wait to read the second book. Speaking of, did anybody know they're currently making a new film?
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