Michael Crichton’s Congo

Michael Crichton’s novel Congo was published in 1980. Like so many of his books it’s basically a techno-thriller. It has a contemporary setting. The technology is not futuristic - it’s the cutting-edge technology of the time. The science is not futuristic either although it would perhaps have been seen as being almost fringe science. Science that is not quite yet accepted as mainstream, or is slightly controversial.

As he did in other novels he goes to great lengths to give the impression that this is a sober factual account, almost an official report.

It begins with a high-tech company, ERTS, sending a mineral survey team to the Congo (or Zaire as it had become but Congo sounds more romantic). Whereas mineral surveys used to take months this company uses the very latest technologies and can do the job in a few days. These technologies include satellite imaging and sophisticated computer data analysis. They are set up so that they can assemble a team within hours and have them onsite within 24 hours.

They have competitors with equal capabilities. In this case it’s a German-Japanese consortium. The objective is diamonds. The key to finding the diamonds is to find the lost city of Zinj. And these are special diamonds, vital in computer technology and there is no other source for them.

ERTS’s team gets wiped out in mysterious circumstances. There is one puzzling piece of evidence - three seconds of footage on videotape. The footage shows what looks a bit like a gorilla. Which is crazy. Gorillas don’t kill people, and they certainly don’t kill people the way the members of the ERTS team were killed.

A new team will be detached, led by the ambitious and very driven 24-year-old Karen Ross. She figures she needs to bring along a primate expert. Dr Peter Elliott is on retainer to ERTS and he’s done controversial but brilliant work on trying to teach language to primates. He insists on bringing Amy along on the expedition. Amy is a seven-year-old gorilla very adept at sign language. It sounds like a crazy idea but Karen Ross suspects that Amy might indeed be a useful member of the team. The new team will be led by ex-mercenary Munro.

The expedition proves to be quite an adventure. Having missiles fired at you, being stalked by cannibals, finding a lost city, being and forced to withstand a siege and getting caught up in a civil war certainly qualify as adventures.

Crichton gets to deal with two science/technology areas that fascinated him. Firstly there’s the computer stuff which he deals with in exhaustive detail. Given that this is the computer technology of 1980 you might think that this would date the book but in fact (in my view at least) it makes it more interesting.

The other area is primate communication, which was a big thing at the time. Quite a few apes had been taught to communicate, usually by sign language, and the results seemed impressive. The animals seemed to be at the very least on the verge of mastering actual language. This will become a major plot point. There’s also some speculative stuff about animal intelligence.

Crichton was very good at using a race-against-time factor to build insane amounts of tension, and in his novels it’s always survival itself that is at stake.

The key ingredients are that lost city built by a long-vanished civilisation, gorilla language, gorillas apparently going on murderous rampages and diamonds and Crichton weaves them altogether with great skill.

There are also interestingly flawed heroes - Elliott, Karen Ross and Munro. They have conflicting agendas, they don’t know what each other’s agendas are and maybe they don’t understand their own motives completely.

A wildly entertaining novel. Very highly recommended.

I’ve also reviewed Crichton’s equally excellent The Andromeda Strain, The Terminal Man, Sphere and Binary.