Then Crichton’s next book, Rising Sun, defined and amped up the brief Japan-will-bury-us panic of the early 1990s. Then Steven Spielberg adapted it, with famous results. (The declining cultural salience of the famous, Philip Roth-level novelist is matched, perhaps, by the declining salience of the famous paperback artist.) First the book sold a zillion copies. It’s really hard to understate how large Michael Crichton loomed in American pop culture in the years after Jurassic Park came out.
You roll with it, like Nedry rolling through the jungle to his fate. The point being: The sentence is a failure standing there alone, but on the page, in the story, it doesn’t matter. Honestly I even think I had edited the sentence in my memory to something slightly more successful, doing the author’s work for him as a thank-you for the grim momentum of his tale: The sign said ELECTRIFIED FENCE 10,000 VOLTS DO NOT TOUCH, but Nedry pushed the gate open with his bare hand … Rather, I remembered the feeling of terrible momentum at that part of the book’s narrative, with the fences turned off and the T-Rex already loose, and dear God if that idiot Nedry was only just now headed into the park, only just now pushing through the fence, the gate, whatever, then nobody in the control room was going to get anything up and running in time to help the kids in the jeep being kicked around by the tyrannosaur, or to keep lots and lots of people from being well and truly eaten. And yet when I came to it, re-reading Michael Crichton’s Jurassic Park for the first time in decades, I remembered it vividly from past readings, and not for its grammatical clumsiness or apparent incoherence.
So surely this is a bad sentence, objectively terrible. The sign said ELECTRIFIED FENCE 10,000 VOLTS DO NOT TOUCH, but Nedry opened it with his bare hand, and unlocked the gate, swinging it wide.ĭoes this sentence scan? Does it … make sense? Not exactly: The “it” should refer to the sign, but Nedry isn’t opening a sign, so he must be opening the electrified fence, but do you normally open a fence? No, you open a gate, but it appears that Nedry is somehow opening the gate first and only then unlocking it, a sequence that suggests a scene out of the mindbending movie Tenet, which this sentence is definitely not describing. Do you want to read a sentence? Here’s a sentence:
0 kommentar(er)
