I’ve just finished reading Jurassic Park and Lost World back to back for about the seventeeth time. They have the same timeless joy for me as the Asterix and Tintin comics that never grow old.
But as I grow older, as my own thought processes advance and regress with experience, in a continuous loop, what I see in the books changes. Different bits of it catch and hold my attention. Now it’s not always about tyrannosaurs hunting hadrosaurs by the river and the pack behaviour of the raptors.
Briefly, it was fascination with the chaos theory. It moved on to the stupidity of the human race. Then the stupidity divided itself into sub-categories: arrogance, ignorance, commercialisation, urbanisation, the romanticising of animals. The world needs more dinosaur museums, not vapid purple talking toys and a franchise called t-rex.
Now, the books seem to be about the futility of the human race. As my favourite Gulf News columnist says, “It's both a sad and a comforting thought that the earth will probably remember us as nothing more than a brief illness.”
Of course – who am I kidding – it’s also always about the tyrannosaurs hunting hadrosaurs by the river, raptor packs and other prehistoric imaginings.
Reluctant though I am to say anything so utterly predictable, the movie is not as good as the book. Though the dinosaurs were pretty cool. I saw the movie before I knew it was a book and if anyone knows of other dinosaur books, I will be grateful for a list.
