Michael Crichton used to tell people that his sense of humour had been surgically removed. His books contained few gags and little irony. But now he has written a satire about the state of the law and the science of genetics. “This makes it a bit of a departure,” he says, “but it seems to me that the situation and the subject matter are so absurd that, unless you treat them as funny, you almost can’t discuss them ... and I am absolutely convinced that more people in the UK have a sense of humour than in the United States.”
His new novel, Next, is a profoundly uncharacteristic piece of work. Though it is a techno-thriller, like Jurassic Park, The Andromeda Strain or Sphere, it is a comedy — almost, indeed, “a romp”. It contains a demanding and sarcastic talking (really talking) parrot and a human-chimp chimera that passes as a schoolboy but, when the chips are down, blows its cover by slinging poo. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this is one Crichton novel that has not immediately been picked up by Hollywood. For the humourless movie mainstream, it feels unfilmable. “I think”, Crichton says drily, “they are experiencing a period of retrenchment now that their principal action star is governor of California.”
It will, nevertheless, sell millions. Crichton books are global brands, as, indeed, are Crichton films — as writer or director (notably Westworld and Coma) — and one huge Crichton TV show, ER. There are also Crichton computer games and Crichton software. The man is a corporation, with earnings reputed to be in the region of £70m per year. Now aged 64, he is 6ft 9in tall and famously handsome. In pictures, he looks like a truly terrifying corporate lawyer of the kind who rips your life apart then rushes off to his tennis lesson with Roger Federer.
In fact, Crichton is a charmingly hesitant man. In intonation and manner, his voice is almost identical to that of another mega-author, Bill Bryson — full of pauses, warm, quizzical, but also quite tough and self-confident. When, for example, I ask if he was politically motivated when he trashed global warming as bad science in his last novel, State of Fear, he snaps back abruptly. “That was a slur... I am not really interested in politics, and so the notion that I had written something that would be perceived as fundamentally political caught me unawares. I don’t have any political involvement: I don’t support any candidate, I don’t give money to anybody and I don’t do advertisements of any sort. But I was accused of being a neocon, which is a great joke to me, and of taking oil money.” The moment of anger then subsides. “People would end their reviews with, ‘Enjoy your oil money, Mr Crichton.’” He chuckles, suddenly warm and charming again.
His apolitical avowals are entirely believable because of a fundamental aspect of the man’s style and imagination. He is a focused and very literal man. One famous story makes the point. He studied English at Harvard. “I was labouring under a misapprehension. It seemed to me, if one wanted to be a writer, one studied English at university. I think that’s not correct. One studies English to be a professor of English. The papers I was writing were not of particular interest to me, and I was not doing very well. I resisted jargon — a bad idea.” Receiving C-plus repeatedly for his essays, he decided to try a literal-minded and quasi-scientific experiment. He submitted George Orwell’s essay Politics versus Literature: An Examination of Gulliver’s Travels under his own name. Orwell did slightly better: he got a B-minus. “I thought, if George Orwell only deserves a B-minus, this was vastly too difficult a field for me. I aspired to be Orwell, and he was just scraping by at Harvard.”
Of course, what he means is that his teachers didn’t know what they were talking about. It was a similar testing of expert views that led him to the conviction that global warming was, basically, not science but a scare story. “At first, I just assumed there was something I didn’t understand. Then I spent the better part of three years on the research, and the further I went, the worse it looked in terms of the quality of what I was seeing.”
Fair enough, though I think he’s wrong. But the stylistic point is this literalness. There’s nothing fuzzy about Crichton’s work. The new book, for example, may be a novel, but it ends with the author’s five recommendations for changing the law relating to genetics, and a seven-page bibliography. His prose, meanwhile, has detectable traces of literary influences — he cites Conan Doyle, for the pace and the belief in reasoned investigation — but it doesn’t really work as literary prose. It is simply a narrative vehicle, a frame rather than the picture itself. And the book as a whole has the woven, episodic style of a television series. He says its complexities are like the human genome, but to me they are more like half a dozen episodes of ER.
Nevertheless, Crichton is an important phenomenon in the history of the novel. His fiction is a direct expression of ideas, anxieties and issues that are in the air. They could equally well be speculative essays. I ask him why, having arrived at such contrarian views about the environment, he didn’t write State of Fear as an essay. “I had that question in my mind. The decision to do it as a novel was made because I had undergone a large transformation in my thinking over the course of several years, and I needed to convey that to an audience in a short time. I didn’t want people just to slam the book shut because they didn’t agree with it — of course, that might mean they didn’t read it at all — so part of making it a novel is to try to arrange a structure in which people might entertain, even for a brief time, ideas that were heretical.”
The satire of Next is focused not on a single delusion, but on what Crichton sees as the outrageous state of the law and the science of genetics. “I was just astonished at the state of knowledge and how it was being interpreted in the courts, which clearly seemed to require revision.” The main plot line is about a man whose cells have unusually potent cancer-fighting properties. His cell line becomes company property and, bizarrely, that seems to allow the company’s agents to seize him or members of his immediate family and take cells from any part of their body. That does seem to be a technical possibility in American law, though Crichton admits that no judge would be likely to uphold it.
“But it’s a close call, and it’s not as clear as one would wish. Such things should not be legal.”
The further horror is that the patenting of specific section of DNA has meant that some diseases are actually owned by private companies, which are thus able to restrict the research of others and to prevent disclosure of their own work. Patenting — intended as a stimulant to beneficial research — is being used to suppress it. On top of that, Crichton says, companies have been able to refuse to allow investigations of the deaths of patients who were given experimental treatments. The causes of the deaths have been covered up as commercially sensitive information. “There’s a kind of lawlessness about the present state of genetic research and the present state of the law... To claim that such deaths are trade secrets — that, to me, is gangsterism.”
The book is punctuated by newspaper reports, a disquieting number of which, Crichton says, are genuine. In addition, there is a hypocritical Christian medical boss in the story. As the head of the Human Genome Project is Francis Collins, a born-again Christian, I ask Crichton if the character is intended to satirise an individual rather than just a type. “I hope he’s not like Francis Collins. At one point, I had to send this to someone who knew Collins and ask him if it was too close for comfort. He said no.” Having met Collins, a very genuine sort, I can also tell him his hypocrite is nothing like the man.
But, apart from invented villains and future fantasies such as chimp- and parrot-human hybrids, the general atmosphere of the book is an accurate reflection of the fevered state of the genetics industry at the moment.
Crichton contrasts this with an earlier, healthier condition of science. “It’s not so much a satire on corporate America, because the academic institutions have the same mentality,” he says. “I’m old enough to have grown up in an era when science was not seen in this corporate way and when people did still have the idea that they were doing research for the betterment of mankind. That now seems to be quaint almost beyond imagining. If you were reared in this other tradition, then the changes that have occurred seem repellent.”
In fact, far from being the corporate-lawyer type I thought he was, Crichton seems to be the enemy of all such breeds. The glossy, shiny, happy veneer of effortless success is also an illusion. He admits to being a depressive.
“It’s a medical diagnosis. All my life I’ve wanted to have some sort of medication at various times, and I’ve tried different things over the years — there’s a much bigger choice now. I think it’s familial: probably everyone in my family has a tendency to be depressed. I have a pragmatic approach to this. I think it’s a biochemical issue and one that is not significantly different from diabetes. You take your medicine, and you’re fine. I did worry for a time that taking medication might stop me writing, but it didn’t happen. In fact, I think a good deal of procrastination in writing is driven by depression.”
Now he quite likes the idea of going back to film-directing. “I don’t have any specific plans. Directing is so consuming. It’s almost like leaving your life for a year and going to live somewhere else. One hesitates, but many things about it attract me, so I may.” As far as books are concerned, it’s time to lighten up. “I’ve decided to do something that’s just fun to do. I think I’m always concerned about becoming a scold. I’ll just do something closer to Jurassic Park.”
He will. And it will make millions. But, to my surprise and delight, he seems to be worth it.
Next is published by HarperCollins, £17.99
