Despite his apparent “normalcy” (a play on words with his name, wouldn’t you say?) he offers some keen insight into the minds and behaviors of his fellow team members down on the ocean floor. Norm, the protagonist of the story, is a middle-aged psychologist who has the easy relatability of the “average” person that you so frequently find in books. To be honest, I could go on and on about each character in depth because they are all so fascinating however, I’ll limit myself to discussing only Norm and Beth, my two favorites. By the end of Sphere, you won’t know who to trust and who to disregard anymore in this way, the novel is a sort of psychological thriller as well. Each character has many more layers than you would ever expect or are aware of until it’s too late at that point, all you can do is quickly accept their true personalities and keep going. If you’ve never experienced the horrid feeling of your first impressions being yanked away as they are disproven time and time again, then get ready for a flood of frustrated sighs and surprised gasps.
These changes are as unexpected as the many plot twists that occur, and are all the more jarring because they betray the trust the reader has in the personalities and motivations of the characters. Each character undergoes an immense amount of development and growth, although not always for the better.
When it comes to page-turners and plot twists, Michael Crichton is king!Īs much as this story is driven by plot, it is also largely motivated by the behaviors of the characters. There is constant action and change, and I even when I wasn’t reading I could not stop thinking about what might happen next. What begins as a mere possibility of alien contact quickly transforms into something more dark, sinister, and foreign. My initial predictions regarding where the story would go were completely off the mark, and I was delighted by how many times I was genuinely surprised by unexpected plot twists. The story and plot themselves are everything that I’ve come to love about Crichton’s writing: unique, unexpected, suspenseful, fast-paced, gripping, and a bit terrifying. While it didn’t surpass Jurassic Park in my mind, it certainly came close. Eager for more, I decided to read another one of his highly praised works: Sphere. Last summer Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park immediately became one of my favorite science fiction novels.
Creepy underwater adventures? A dysfunctional team of professionals? Possible alien activity? If this isn’t a recipe for a chilling sci-fi story then I don’t know what is!