Grand, page turning thriller but way too many characters.

I read this book at the weekend on the train from Cork to Dublin. Unfortunately these days, I can’t seem to find a stretch of time to sit and read and as result I’ve about 5 books half-read lying around the house, plots I can barely remember and so I doubt I’ll ever get around to finishing them.

So as the prospect of approximately 3 hours uninterrupted “me time” beckoned, I grabbed this novel for pure escapism and hopefully an “unputdownable” quality for that time.

I must say, I really enjoyed it. As a story it romped along. Crichton is a bit overpowering with his overkill on preaching the message: gene patents are bad. But I did find the ownership of human tissue treatment quite interesting. Who owns and has rights to blood samples/organs/eggs/sperm/genes once they’ve left your body. He takes this a step further, if a research facility is awarded rights to your cells/genes, does it therefore have permission to take this cells/genes too from your offspring.

There was a huge number of characters and stories in the book  for a relatively short novel, which resulted really in fairly light treatment of all, there wasn’t any deep characterisation of any of them really. The end of the novel was a bit too contrived even for me, too many of the unrelated characters meeting up.

But for a few hours’ escapism which was a bit different from my usual thriller it worked and I enjoyed it.

Rated 3/5 on Sep 24 2007 by ManicMammy
Review Tags: book, fiction, gene, genetics, novel, story, thriller
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