The Great Zoo Of China
By Matthew Reilly
2015, Orion hb, 529pp
Some books
are on my shelves for years before I get round to reading them, while some that
I particularly want to read soon might
still take six months or a year to actually get to. I saw a full page advert in
a magazine for newly-released THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA, did a little online
poking around, and ordered it from my local library, along with Stephen King’s
MR. MERCEDES, and after a couple of weeks, they both arrived on the same day. I
read the King book first, but a day after finishing got note from the library
that THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA had to go back [as with most new books, there’s a
waiting list; usually, you can keep books, with nine renewals, for twenty-seven
weeks, enough for even the slowest reader]. So, I was faced with a pretty huge
doorstop of a book, and the problem of could I get it read in little over a
week. Well, clearly I could, because with big-ish print, lots of white space in
chapter breakups and a handful of maps and diagrams, this huge book only runs
to [I estimate] around 100,000 words. Also, it reads like gangbusters.
The plot;
well, essentially, and in a movie-pitch sort of style, it’s Jurassic Park with
dragons instead of dinosaurs, set in the jungles of China. Or, if you’d care
for another handle, it’s a Jane MaClaine Die Hard With Dragons. Forty years ago
the Chinese government discovered that dragons were real and were nested
beneath the surface of the earth. Keeping this massive secret from the world,
they have carried out a research program into the creatures, placing them in
captivity and bringing in some of the worlds experts to oversee their project.
Eventually, in a bid to own the most awesome visitor-attraction in the world,
they have spent trillions of moolah to build a massive and ultra high-tech
safari-type zoo environment in a jungled valley of Southern China.
Herpetologist CJ Campbell, and her brother Hamish, are two of the experts
helicoptered in to be given a pre-opening tour of the place, boat-rides,
cable-cars, maglev trains, revolving mountaintop restaurants, the works. But
captive dragons aren’t keen on remaining captive, so before long [about 20% in]
everything goes belly-up, the dragons go nuts, and a long, long, 400 page
action sequence begins.
This is a
strange novel. It’s a pretty good concept, and author Reilly has a fair-enough
kind of explanation for the dragons and their long history, and he adequately
describes the enormous environment in which they are held. Also, his action
sequences are truly massive, truly vast in scope, and, most of the latter 400
pages has truly enormous dragons going completely batshit, destroying
everything around them, picking up petrol tankers and launching them from the
air like bombs, or snatching helicopters from the skies, to smashing up
buildings of reinforced concrete. There’s non-stop carnage and death and
destruction here; head-biting, neck-snapping, gut-flying, car-boat-dragon
chases, explosions, fire, machine guns, last-second escapes, completely awesome
but all completely over-the-top action;
Peter Jackson would get tired, Michael Bay would have a migraine!! CJ Cameron,
the female herpetologist somehow becomes Lara Croft or Jane Bond, surging from
one reptilian assault to another, surviving by the skin of her teeth to the
point of complete and total unbelievability. I think this book is the most action-heavy
book I’ve ever read in my life. Sometimes it gets too much, too repetitive, and
too samey-samey that, despite drawings of maps and detailed explanations, I
still wasn’t always exactly sure where our heroes were running to or which part
of the Dragon Zoo was exploding. You just sort of get the gist, the important
action, while the pertinent details often happen as a fuzzy bang. There were
times when I was bored of dragons throwing helicopters about the place, and
times when I was considering leaving the rest of it unread and going for a lie
down. But, to be fair, there were also action sequences that were engaging and
reasonably exciting and kept the pages flying by; sometimes, when you get the
point that it’s completely over-the-top and pretty paper-thin, you can’t help
getting carried away with it, and I was laughing out loud at the
ridiculousness of the next giant action extravaganza. Phew!
But, to be
equally fair, the action, is pretty much all there is. The rest of the book is
as empty as Jurassic Park’s gift-shop. There is very little depth to anything,
the characters are largely stereotypes with cardboard-cutout development, and
the writing style leaves little for contemplation; it’s a fast and lean, James
Patterson kind of style, all fire and fists, but no space for much flair in the
writing. The book screams Movie Deal! and
the action is all very visual, but to be honest, if this was made into a
Hollywood blockbuster it would cost as much to make as building an actual
dragon zoo yourself, and more-to-the-point, any successful script would need
extra work to muscle in a bit of character development, unless it were to
become a Transformers-like mess.
I kind of
enjoyed THE GREAT ZOO OF CHINA to some extent. There were some visuals I’ll
remember for a while, and I’ll recall the whole awesome ridiculousness of it, and
it was very fast-paced and easy read. But if, as a reader, you enjoy a bit more
originality, and a bit more depth or substance to your books, it’s probably not
for you. Tonnes of dragons, though.
