thewasp's Full Review: Michael Crichton - Timeline
Like "Jurassic Park," "Timeline" begins with an incident that costs the life of a low-level employee of a hidden, octopus-like corporation. The company's plans could fundamentally alter reality as we know it, simply by making us know it better. The aroused curiosity of the people who have the dead body on their hands (until the company gets it back and cremates it) is but the first signal that things are unraveling for the company.
All this happens in New Mexico, while over in France, a Yale medieval history professor is getting signals that his archeological dig, paid for largely by the same company, also seems to be unraveling. He returns with an executive to New Mexico, and suddenly his graduate students, carrying on in his stead, start to find stuff in the dig which he left there shortly before the 1357 battle which leveled most of the significant structures in the area. The story reaches a new plateau when three of them have to go back too, accompanied by two security types who, "Star Trek"-style, get wasted immediately upon their arrival. One of them manages to send a grenade forward through time which blows up all but one of the time machines the company still controls. About this time, the evil company head decides he's better off if none of them come back.
"Timeline" isn't a perfect sci-fi adventure novel, but it was good enough to get me up Christmas morning after maybe five hours of sleep to pick up right where I left off, and finish it before noon. The characterizations are vivid enough that I fear for them, and of course the plot, if this should be made into a movie. To understand what I mean, consider the fate of "Jurassic Park." Hammond, of InGen, was in the book the same sort of single-minded callous manipulator that Doniger is here, while Harding was a classic warrior prince in the mold of Marek in "Timeline." Naturally, Spielberg (whose movies are typically very good, in all fairness) decided to make the Hammond character a loveable old man with a heart to match his imagination, and Harding an expendable cipher, reversing Crichton's decision to kill Hammond and spare Harding. Does this mean that the evil Robert Doniger will appeal his death sentence to the higher court of the movies? (Fie on him!)
It doesn't sit well with me at all that Andre Marek would probably die in his stead. All right, so Marek is perhaps a notch less sympathetic than Chris Hughes, by virtue of being less pathetically out-of-place in the fourteenth century. In fact, Marek fits in well enough that he is reminiscent of the main character in a Steven Seagal movie that leaves you saying, "Come on, nobody's THAT good!" (A Steven Seagal movie? Oh, hell, you don't think...) Of course, without a character like this they would all have been dead. (They have a name for this sort of character in Dungeons and Dragons: munchkins.) Hughes and the other graduate student, Kate Erickson, each kill four people and blow up one building, leading them to become an item (Kate is having his baby at the end of the book, apparently solving his woman problems indefinitely). Marek kills considerably more than that, and leads them in various Errol Flynn-like escapes from people who want to kill them.
Speaking of the end of the book, let's just say that different characters end at different times. A total of five twentieth-century people (the book starts in 1998, so we can't call them twenty-first century people) never get out of the fourteenth century alive, but other than the two security people, I won't tell you who they are. Just read it.
In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his...More at HotBookSale
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