Michael Crichton. Congo. 1980. Ballantine, 1993.

Michael Crichton is known for examining scientific “what ifs?” such in as his Jurassic Park: What if we found enough dinosaur DNA to reconstruct a dinosaur? Congo contains the intersection of two scientific researches going on in the late seventies. This intersection takes us to the Congo.

First, integrated circuits or microchips had been invented, and people are looking for ways to make them smaller. This is 1979. What if a rare industrial diamond proved to be a perfect semiconductor?

Second, we have all read about Koko the gorilla and a few other apes kept in captivity that have been taught to communicate in a simple manner with humans. What if we could take such an ape to the wild to communicate with their relatives in the wild? Would we then be able to communicate with them? Would such an ape teach its young how to communicate the way that, say, crows in certain regions have learned tricks and then passed them on? For example, for a number of years crows in one region have learned to chase squirrels into traffic for a quick roadkill meal. This trick has been passed on.

Within these fascinating ideas, Crichton tells a clever story. A semiconductor manufacturing firm is trying to find these blue diamonds along the Rwanda-Congo (then called Zaire) border. A team discovered such diamonds by tracking down the location of a “lost city” known in antiquity as Zinj. Crichton got this name from the Arabic name for what is today the Tanzanian coast, Zanj.

The city was known for its diamonds in ancient times, but had been hidden by the jungle for centuries. A few explorers describe it, and Earth Resources Technology Services (ERTS) sends a team to try to relocate it to find those blue diamonds. The team finds the city and sends one video transmission describing their discovery but showing them being killed by strange anthropoid apes.

A consortium of German and Japanese companies has also sent a team. (Back in the day these were the two main countries competing with the American electronics industry.) Who will get there first? What will happen?

To complicate things, there is ongoing warfare along the border at this time. (For what it is worth, I once was stationed with a couple of men from the Zaire military who described exactly such fighting along their Eastern frontier.) In addition, solar flares during that year interfered with many radio signals, making outside communication via radio impossible. A nearby volcano also is rumbling (there actually would be a significant eruption there in 1980).

Mostly, though, the challenge is what Conrad called the heart of darkness. Crichton’s description of the interior African rain forest sounds forbidding. The tall trees and layers of vegetation make it very hot, very moist, and surprisingly dark. Crichton quotes a number of historians and African explorers like Henry M. Stanley to give a sense of both what the jungle and the practices of its native peoples are like. I would recommend this book to anyone studying Heart of Darkness just to get a greater sense of the people and territory Conrad was describing in his novel.

The ERTS team arrives, led by hunter-mercenary “Captain” Munro and overseen by ERTS executive Karen Ross. With them are Peter Elliot and Amy. Elliot is a primatologist who has taught the young gorilla Amy over six hundred terms using a variation of American Sign Language.

This expedition has many obstacles to overcome. They refer to it as the Congo Field Survey, but it could just as easily have been called the Eldorado Expedition like Conrad’s voyage up the Congo River. Except for Elliot, they are in it for the money. Fame appeals more to Elliot.

One of the more interesting concepts in Congo would be further developed in Crichton’s Next: What if people trained animals to be killers and then the animals continued to pass their knowledge on to their offspring when their human trainers were long gone?

Congo also looks back. The city of Zinj guarded by mutant or hybrid gorillas certainly has echoes of Tarzan’s city of Opar and the new species of ape that raised Tarzan. It may be a little more plausible because of the scientific explanations. The name Zinj may also have been partly inspired the name originally given to an extinct ape found in East Africa: Zinjanthropus.

Although the story is clever science fiction combined with action and adventure, there is some humor. When primatologists observe Amy and other monkeys that have been trained to communicate, they note that those that communicate look down on their own species who do not know how to do that.

Such observations led another researcher, John Bates, to say in 1977 that “we are producing an educated animal élite which demonstrates the same snobbish aloofness that a Ph.D. shows a truck driver…It is highly unlikely that the generation of language-using primates will be skillful ambassadors in the field. They are simply too disdainful.” (66)

Ah, elitists vs. deplorables even among other creatures! (To the best of my limited knowledge, Crichton invented John Bates.)

This entertaining story has a lot to it. It is pre-Jurassic Park Crichton, but it is still a good tale with lots of food for thought. Like Star Trek: Voyager, an underlying question is simply this: What does it mean to be human?

P.S. One of this reviewer’s all-time favorite essays is by Crichton. It also humorously sends up elitists who think they understand all things. Its title? “Aliens Cause Global Warming.”