Introduction
Congo is a novel written in the adventure genre in 1980 by Michael Crichton. The story centers on the expedition in the deep of Congo’s rain forests searching for diamonds. The novel starts with the end of an expedition when people were attacked and killed by an unknown enemy, and the contact between the expedition and the outer world is lost. When searching for diamonds, an expedition discovers the legendary lost ancient city, called Zinj. A video image, which was taken by an expedition and transmitted to the base station in the US proved, proved that gorillas were the ones responsible for numerous murders. Michael Crichton described the gorillas as primates who have odd lifestyles; by their appearance, they are different from the normal gorillas – smaller, with gray fur. “They have gray fur and light yellow eyes, and stand roughly four feet six inches tall’’. Animals were communicating with the help of wheezing sounds.
Main body
The new expedition, led by Karen Ross, was organized to find out more information about the city of Zinj and the brand new type of diamonds, which are able to change the shape of the whole world. This time the researchers took a famous mercenary Munro, gorillas trainer Peter Elliot, along with his female gorilla – Amy, who was trained to communicate with people, by using sign language. But this time the expedition got some competitors, like the consortium of Japanese and European corporations, which were also after the diamonds, so the expedition turns into a race, where the finish will be the city of Zinj. The success of the expedition was harmfully affected by many delays, including the plane crash, jungle predator, and civil wars.
When Ross and her expedition finally reached Zinj, they discovered the consortium camp, which was also ruined and devoid of life. After the first battle with the killer gorillas, some of them are killed. After examining the dead gorillas they find out that these gorillas are the new species of primates – a gorilla-human hybrid.
Peter Elliot names the new species Gorilla Elliotensis after himself. Later, the expedition finds out that gorillas were bread by the ancient inhabitants, to guard the diamonds of the city of Zinj against the outer intruders. After some more attacks of the gorillas and further their examination, Peter, with the help of Amy, discovers the way to tame the killer-gorillas. But shortly the eruption of a nearby volcano destroys their plans and they have to run for their lives, leaving the city of Zinj and all the signs of existence of the new species under magma. The team escaped from the danger. At the end of the book, we find out, that Monroe had a chance to grab some of the diamonds and later sold them and Amy is teaching her offspring’s a sign language.
In this work, Michael Crichton puts a lot of research. Like a lot of his works, Congo comes with graphs and maps. The work is read more like a scientific paper, than a novel.
Conclusion
Each page keeps the reader interested in the next one. Readers are trying to guess what is the next twist or the turn in the book. If ‘’Congo’’ was the first book you read by Michael Crichton, you will surely want to read the others.
Michael Crichton puts an amazing degree of research into his work – his novels even come littered with schematics and graphs. Indeed his sf works often read more like scientific papers than novels