Michael Crichton's Micro - Or, is it possible to be a post-structuralist when you're being eaten alive?

I really should write something about one of the best books that I've read in an age. Jennifer Egan's A Visit From The Goon Squad is a polyphonic wonder that manages to be both compassionate and cynical, all in the same breath. But instead I thought it would be much more fun to write a playful post about Michael Crichton's final novel Micro, and one that features that most charming of bugs, the parasitic wasp. 

I've got friends who would not touch a 'page turner' or a thriller with a barge-pole. Unless, of course, it's Dan Brown. They must read Dan Brown in order to get involved in the sneering. To be honest that's the only reason I read Dan Brown. And if I'm sneering at something it must be bad. Dan Brown does make it easy to sneer though. If you name your book The Da Vinci code, ignoring the actual name of the artist, one that has been used for over 500 years, and one that even the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles could get right, you deserve to be sneered at. It's a good thing Leonardo didn't knock out his etchings in Scunthorpe or we'd have been subjected to 'The of Scunthorpe Code'. Still, I’m sure Brown's millions protect him from the pain inherent in any lack of critical acclaim. 

Anyway, back to those page-turning thrillers. I love a page turner. Genres – although I shy away from fixing the genre tag to anything that I enjoy - make up a large part of my reading. In particular, Michael Crichton is a writer I love. Jurassic Park sold me on him. I watched the film – I'm a sucker for dinosaurs and adored it – and then went straight out and grabbed the book. Unlike with Dan Brown, I find that Crichton does not distract with clumsy or incompetent writing. Okay, he does push his stories along formulaically, sacrificing showy prose for speed of plot; but he always keeps the intellectual faculties pulsing, constantly drawing on his fascination with the world of science and its advances and dangers. Micro was his final book, and one that had to be completed by another writer after Crichton died in 2008. This issue of dual authorship made me slightly sceptical and resulted in a five year delay in reading it. But on biting the bullet – I'm deliberately deploying clichés to get you in the mood for the experience of reading this kind of prose – I loved it. 

Very loosely, Micro's plot concerns a group of graduate scientists who are invited to Hawaii to see if they would like to get involved with a cutting edge experiment that reduces people to a few centimetres in height and then places them in a rainforest where they can observe the local fauna and flora. There are of course nasty and brutish villains involved, some very unethical approaches to science, and – the most fun of all – lots of suddenly massive animals: ants, birds, bats, and giant centipedes. And, unlike the po-faced Brown, Crichton manages to get some fabulous and often savage jokes into his work. His last book contains one of my favourites. Added to the team of budding scientists shrunk and sent into the Hawaiian rainforest is Danny Minot.  

“Danny Minot was getting a doctorate in science studies, a mélange of psychology and sociology, with liberal doses of French postmodernism thrown in … he quoted Bruno Latour, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and others who believed that there was no objective truth, only the truth that’s established by power.  Minot was here in the lab to complete a thesis on ‘Scientific linguistic codes and paradigm transformation’.  In practise it meant he made a pest of himself, bothering people, recording conversations with the other grad students as they did their work.  They all despised him.”

Basically then, Danny is a post-structuralist. As part of my English literature degree, I dabbled – or rather was forced to dabble – in this. It wore me out, left me feeling frustrated and joyless. Apart from Barthes' Mythologies and the occasional snatch of Foucault, I gave it short shrift when choosing modules. The relativist nature that lies at the heart of post-structuralism coupled with prose that seems purposefully designed to obfuscate and elude, left me annoyed. Scientists in particular baulk at these theorists, probably because one of the main areas that post-structuralism questions is science and its results. Humans are, apparently, way too complex, and are unable to escape power structures, rendering any solid conclusions invalid. Crichton, a writer who has always placed serious science at the heart of his work, certainly didn't have any time for them either. With that in mind, it's all too clear that Danny is going to meet a gruesome end. But just how nasty is Crichton going to make it? Enter the parasitic wasp, nature at its cruellest and most macabre. Stephen Jay Gould, my favourite evolutionist - much more 'human' and less polarising than Richard Dawkins - wrote in his 1989 essay ‘Nonmoral Nature’ about parasitic wasps (ichneumonoidea): 

Giant Ichneumon wasp - 'stay on my arm you little charmer'

"The ichneumon, like most wasps, generally live freely as adults but pass their larva life as parasites feeding on the bodies of other animals … The most common victims are caterpillars (butterfly and moth larvae), but some ichneumons prefer aphids and other attack spiders. Most host are parasitized as larvae, but some adults are attacked, and many tiny ichneumons inject their brood directly into the eggs of their host.”

So, rather like what happens to John Hurt's character in the film Alien. An adult wasp anaesthetizes a host, lays its eggs in that host, and then, when the larvae awaken they have fresh meat – fresh because the host is still alive – to set them on the path to adulthood. The wasp larvae basically start to eat the host from the inside. This is exactly what happens to Danny. Temporarily incapacitated by a giant wasp so it can lay her eggs inside Danny's arms, he then spends the next two hundred or so pages in a horrific limbo waiting for the larvae to hatch. In the end [look away now if you don’t want this spoiled] Crichton seems to take pity on him and comes up with a less grizzly death. But still, his unwanted 'occupation' certainly curbs his post-structuralist proselytizing (although power structures suddenly seem very relative when you've been shrunk to half an inch in height and are being attacked by a pregnant wasp who has no truck with modern midwifery). In fact, a recently discovered parasitic wasp has just been given a name inspired by Harry Potter's notorious prison guards the 'Dementors'.  These mysterious creatures suck out the soul of a person with just one kiss, thus providing a very apt analogy for Ampulex dementor. 

A 'Dementor' and one of its taxonomical spawn Ampulex dementor 

And in many ways, this is exactly what post-structuralism reminds me of: a parasitic wasp, implanting its consuming and all-devouring ideas in a much more beautiful host. Yep, I'll keep getting told that I don't understand it - or, again, that I'm too enthusiastic, too unquestioning of the things that I find beautiful, stirring and moving. And it's not that I don't have time for relativity, ambiguity and uncertainty; I just don't want what I encounter to be reduced to a kind of intellectual nihilism. Actually, now I think of it there's quite a bit of post-structuralism going on in Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad. Shifting perspectives, the inability of one ‘agent’ to understand another, the evolution of language and the problems therein – the last chapter addresses this superbly –, but all of it done with warmth, clarity and charm. Give it a go, but then also make some time for a writer like Crichton, particularly if you like bugs with unusual ways of getting their tiny offspring up and running.           

Postscript: I see that I've implied that Ampulex dementor isn't beautiful. After looking at the photograph over the past 24 hours, I find that I'm mistaken.  She looks lovely!