As Summer approaches Hobbit Towers and I look forward to some *serious* reading time, I also become nostalgic for certain books. To me Ray Bradbury captures the essence of a long summer stretching out in front of you (Dandelion Wine), and Stephen King always makes me an ideal beach-type read.
This is another one.
Dinosaur Summer is a title that pretty much sums the book up. It’s not your typical read from Greg Bear, but it is a great read and one which works for me on different levels.
The concept is quite simple. Clearly in homage to all those old monster movies (King Kong, The Lost World, The Valley of Gwangi) and inspired by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger stories (see The Lost World again) it is set in a world of the 1940’s, but a place where the Challenger stories are true. In other words, real living dinosaurs still exist and were rediscovered in 1912 by explorers, including Edward Challenger, in expeditions to El Grande in Venezuela. Brought back to the US, the living dinosaurs enjoyed general popularity for a while but now, after war, their novelty has waned and the ‘dinosaur circus’ is not what it used to be. Over-exploitation has meant that the Venezuelan government has restricted access to El Grande and have banned all exports, which has meant that as the dinosaurs have died in captivity (mainly through mistreatment) there have been none to replace them. Widespread enthusiasm has given way to public indifference.
Our story is told from the perspective of fifteen year old Peter Belzoni and his father Anthony, who, as part of a National Geographic article, have been given the task of reporting on the last of the circuses, ‘LOTHAR GLUCK’S DINOSAUR CIRCUS’, as it approaches bankruptcy and closure for the final time. Peter is to write a report from his teenage perspective, having spent all of his life in a world with such mighty animals, whilst his father is to photograph the event for posterity.
The two pack up their meagre belongings in Manhattan and make their way to Circus Lothar, where Peter, over the summer, gets to live with and fall in love with the dinosaurs. We meet a menagerie of creatures – avisaur-like struthioes named Dip and Casso, a centrosaurus named Sammy, an ankylosaur called Sheila, as well as one large predatory venator (raptor) named Dagger.
The imminent closure of the circus leads to an even grander plan. Peter, Anthony and Vince Shellabarger, the circus trainer, as well as camera and effects man Willis O’Brien and animator Ray Harryhausen, who are given the task of returning the dinosaurs back to El Grande.
Think Born Free, but with dinosaurs.
So, what works? This can be seen as a YA novel, as our protagonist goes on his bildungsroman-esque rite of passage, and it is fun to see what sort of a person Peter becomes at the end of it. The world building is clever and logical, and all rather nostalgic in ways reminiscent of Bradbury and King. It is quite clear in what sort of world Dinosaur Summer is initially set. Men wear hats, women wear demure swimsuits, people write with fountain pens, travel is often by boxcar and Pullman and there’s a somewhat timeless, innocent quality that harkens back to the Golden Age of Hollywood for me.
When we get to the jungles of Venezuela, the story becomes an all-out adventure romp, with Peter facing challenge after challenge to reach his objective. The tale becomes an exciting ‘will they-won’t they’ tale that is, by turns, exciting and horrifying. I found I cared about what happens to Peter his father and friends but also a certain degree of empathy for Sammy, Dap, and even the rather scary Dagger.
To this, though, in the end there is also a feeling that, as we read, we are witnessing the end of an age, not just the age of the circus as entertainment, but also the loss of incredible marvels and innocent wonders that we have never had chance to experience on this world. It is both thrilling and elegiac, a book that pushes the ‘what-if?’ and recreates that feeling that may be akin to that exhibited in, say, the Jurassic Park movies. It touches some degree of the elemental, taking us back to a time when we were more primitive, perhaps. What Greg manages most of all is to create a feeling that something important has happened and we will never see its like again.
This was a book I bought on a whim back in 1998. Illustrated with some superb pictures by Tony DiTerlizzi, I’ve never regretted it.
Dinosaur Summer is perhaps a lesser known novel by Greg, but one of his I have most enjoyed, as more human and more emotional than many of his bigger SF novels. It is a tale told with heart that wins the reader over, and one that gets better with a re-read.
Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear
Published by Warner Books, 1998.
304 pages
ISBN: 0-446-52098-5
Review by Mark Yon, July 2015
