Po-ta-toes, po-tah-toes

There is an episode in the sitcom F.R.I.E.ND.S. in which Pheobe thinks that dragons and dinosaurs are as same as ‘po-ta-toes and po-tah-toes’ ­— just a degree of pronunciation (and therefore, spelling). Could she have been confused because a lot of people who do not understand or who deny evolution think that both of these are mythical animals? Or is it that the hyperbole that arose out of the immensity of the discovery of the fossils simply stuck around for Pheobe to pick up at the turn of the 21st century?

The title of Michael Crichton’s posthumous publication, Dragon Teeth, comes from the scene in which the characters discover the fossils or the teeth of the largest dinosaur known until then. The christening happens when the team finds a possibly 100-feet-long dinosaur with a head over two feet above the ground. Cope, the paleontologist, calls it Brontosaurus, “thundering lizard”. But the interesting thing is that he considers the name Apatosaurus or “unreal lizard” too, “because it is hard to believe such a thing ever existed.” The unreal, mythical “dragon” teeth thus found are the stuff of the tribulations faced by the team, and especially the central character William Johnson.

Conceived around the mid-1970s, Dragon Teeth is a thriller that fictionalises the events related to the digging for bones that preoccupied the paleontologists 100 years earlier (also known as Bone Wars). The rival paleontologists Edwin Drinker Cope and Othniel Marsh, based on real people of the same name, conduct separate expeditions to the West in search of fossils. The rich and spoiled William Johnson, a student at Yale, gets stuck when he inadvertently walks into a bet, and in order to prove his worth takes up a challenge that requires him to brave the weather, the fear of Indians and other hardships, and join a team. The adventure requires him to be skilled and he must learn how to shoot pictures and develop them. While he is mistaken to be dead, he spends a few months in Deadwood, a lawless town in order to earn and save enough to reach an urban area that has access to telegraph so that he can get back to where he came from. If it sounds very stretched, it is.

The idea of causation is an indispensable aspect of a thriller. That understanding of the plot, as in this novel too, is the feat of propulsion through a series of events that are hushed together. There is some action, barely living up to its taxonomical decision of being labelled a thriller, but little else. The conjoining of the events sails through a smattering of references to the intellectual, personal and scientific conflicts of the 19th century, to the coming of the camera, and to the government’s war on Native Americans.

The novel precedes Crichton’s better-known dinosaur connection. The scandal unleashed by Charles Darwin, and the evidence of evolution in the locating of the extinct species like dinosaurs are merely mentioned in the conversations between the members of the excavation team. They chat a bit about being “one of those educated fools who has departed from righteousness to blasphemy.” They are in the thick of the wars fought between the tribes like the Sioux and the US government, and an Indian scout in the team even gets killed. There are references to the scalping of the Whites by the tribes: “they cut off all the hair right around the head, after they club you to death, of course. Except sometimes you’re not completely dead and you can feel the knife cutting off the skin and hair right down to the eyebrows.” But beyond the sensationalism or the horror of it, there is nothing. Deadwood, the town that came up as a result of the Gold Rush of the 1870s, is where Johnson ends up. The gunmen, outlaws and gamblers of the place parade in a chunk of the novel, without any serious treatment of their historicity. So, everything that defined the 1870s is only brought together here so that the hero who comes from Yale gets back there.

As a work of historical and biographical fiction, Dragon Teeth is too simplistic in its approach towards the times that it seeks to reconstruct and represent. The novel has a bibliography at the end of sources as diverse as biographies, journals and scientific papers. But it comes across as a very inchoate attempt at some other idea. Crichton fans might be interested in this novel to inspect how he came to be drawn towards these animals as fantastical as dragons, and also for a measure of suspense. But they might find it to be too scattered to leave an impact.
Dragon Teeth

Michael Crichton

Harper Collins

2017, pp 304

Rs 399