Timeline is Michael Crichton’s freshest, most interesting work since Jurassic Park, and is bound to make a great film (god knows he needs a decent adaptation after The Lost World, Sphere and The 13th Warrior). It’s about scientists and scholars who go back in time to 14th century Europe to study things such as archaic language, architecture, and customs. But Medieval France is smack-dab in the Hundred Years War, and let’s just say the locals are a bit cranky. (One expendable character is beheaded by brutal warlords and trampled to pulp by their chargers just five minutes into her journey.)
Believe me, you wouldn’t want to be a working scientist in Crichton’s world. You think your freeway commute is a bitch? Try being sucked through a quantum wormhole and finding yourself in feudal France circa 1357 — and if you’re not standing in the right place at the right time for the return trip, you miss your time travel train and are forever marooned amongst mad monks, poverty-stricken predators, knife-wielding knights and duplicitous dames. You think your workday is tough? Imagine spending your shift having to duck and dodge catapults that hurl white-hot pitch over castle walls, trying to avoid suspicion of sorcery so as not to be burned as a witch, or, not knowing how to ride or fight, having to joust to the bloody death. Tired of spending your lunch money for a little something off the roach coach? Well, try noshing on a live rat which is thrown down into the soup you’re living in known as “Milady’s Bath” — a briny dungeon pit where you’re being held prisoner.
Crichton does an excellent job of explaining the logical aspects of his story, making it easy for scientific simpletons like me to understand, without dummying down. He explains that what the scientists are doing isn’t really and truly time travel, but is more like jumping from universe to universe — or multiverses, as he calls them. Each time and place exists in perpetuity within its own unique multiverse. He likens the mode of travel to being faxed. However, when a person makes several trips, they start to acquire “transcription errors.” Think of it like this: What happens when you send a fax of a fax of a fax? Now imagine a human being coming out of the machine in the same state as a fourth-generation fax.
The story hits the ground running, then bogs down a bit as there is a perfunctory, assembly-line introduction of the cast of characters. I’ll give Crichton the benefit of the doubt and blame it on the abridgement, but the characters in Timeline don’t have a lot of “character.” Even the high-tech billionaire wunderkind who, like the entrepreneur in Jurassic Park, plans to build a theme playground featuring artifacts from a lost world, wasn’t particularly interesting. But the plotting, pacing and writing more than make up for that. This is a rolicking, sword-swinging, stampeding, action-adventure, scientific-thriller — in other words, “We don’t need no stinkin’ three-dimensional characters!”
The reader, Stephen Lang, has a detached, no-nonsense delivery, which fits in nicely with the theme — he sounds like a professor. Also, there was no annoying music during the reading, which I sincerely appreciated. Oftentimes in audio books, the music is intrusive and overbearing as it engulfs the reader’s words.
Timeline is a book that has universal — er, make that multiuniversal — appeal. It’s a mystery, it’s a thriller, it’s historical fiction, it’s scientific horror, and just to be perverse, there’s even a dash of romantic intrigue thrown into the quantum foam mix. This is an audio book that will make you late for work as you sit in the parking lot listening for “just a few more minutes.”
Reviewed by Staci Layne Wilson
Addendum: Boy, was I ever wrong about the film! The 2003 movie, directed by Richard Donner, was a dud.