THE LIBRARY LIZARD
EEK! AN ECO-THRILLER!

For some time now villains have been pretty much right-wing types: greedy businessmen, corrupt politicians, rogue CIA agents, and the like. Michael Crichton's new eco-thriller "State of Fear" (HarperCollins, 2004) gives us a new baddie--the evil environmentalist. As Kinky Friedman would say, "Hold the weddin'!" What the heck's going on here?

The plot of this 603-pager boils down basically to this: The leading environmental organizations are being run by evil men who will stop at nothing to (a) rake in the money and (b) cement their power by fake alarms about impending global disaster. When I say they will stop at nothing, I mean they will try to blast loose a monster iceberg from the Antartican ice shelf, seed the clouds to cause disastrous floods in the American Southwest, and spawn a horrendous tsunami by triggering underseas landslides in the Pacific, just to name a few of their nefarious schemes.

The heroes are a mixed bag: a noble businessman, a scientist who sees through the humbug, a lawyer who slowly comes to realize who the bad guys are, a couple of feisty females, a dopey Hollywood action-film actor, and several minor characters. Their lives are in constant peril. The businessman disappears, the victim of a suspicious wreck-off-a-cliff-into-the-ocean. The lawyer and his lady friend fall into a deep ice crevasse in Antarctica, are zapped by artificial lightning in a laboratory, are struck by real lightning in Arizona (generated, of course, by the environmentalists), and are captured by cannibals on a Pacific Island. (The actor, who is captured with them, has no more sense than to be flattered when the cannibals admiringly feel his thighs and bulging biceps.)

Hokey hardly describes it. The book reminds me of those serials we used to see at the Saturday picture shows, where each chapter ends in a cliff-hanger. And the characters are so broadly drawn they are almost laughable. But at the same time, it is an entertaining yarn. If you are in the mood for a real page-turner, you can't beat this one.

It is also an educational book, the only novel I have ever read that is studded with footnotes. And folded in with the action there are long dissertations about environmental issues, mostly disputing the views held by leading environmentalists. Crichton takes a contrarian view of almost everything the scientific community believes today about the threat to the planet, and he makes a pretty convincing case. He ends the book with a 20-page annotated bibliography of sources for further reading, some of which I intend to sample.

Who knows? Maybe the good news is, the bad news is wrong. But that's for another blogging.