Make me good but not Yeti
Tom Hiney
ESAU by Philip Kerr Chatto, £15.99, pp. 356 There is a healthy fashion at the moment for informative novels. It is the shared propensity of such bestselling writ- ers as John Grisham, Michael Crichton and Patricia Cornwell to give the reader hard- researched facts as well as a good story. For a generation of readers over-familiar with television suspense, drama, action and posturing are no longer enough.
By its market-led nature, popular fiction is always more versatile than its literary cousin and more willing to adapt to change. It could be that in fact-based fiction these writers have landed on a new genre; a fusion of Newsweek with trash.
As 'England's Michael Crichton', Philip Kerr seems well aware of this thirst for knowledge (as much as for entertainment) among his readers. His last book, Gridiron, told you as much as you could ever expect to know about futuristic architecture. His new book, Esau, gives you a New Scientist- style insight into the world of palaeo- anthropology as well as a history of actual Yeti 'sightings' over the last 100 years, by mountaineers and Nepalese.
Kerr's characters border on the card- board and his dialogue is embarrassing, but he has other ways of making you want to turn the page. His characters are primarily there (like actors in a Natural History Museum sketch) as a way to get the infor- mation through. We meet our protagonist, Dr Stella Swift, for instance, as she is giving a lecture to her students at Berkeley:
Now around the same time, a scientist called Maurice Goodman picked up on something that people had more or less forgotten: the discovery by George Nuttall, a Professor of Biology at the University of Cambridge, that the chemistry of blood proteins might be used to determine the genetic relatedness between higher primates.
The fact is, nonetheless, that Esau is a good book and (by the end) even an excit- ing one. Kerr establishes his research credentials so solidly in the first half that one is happy to accept as plausible his hypothetical and dramatic showdown in the second half. Abominable Snowmen, the CIA (always lurking somewhere in this type of book) and the improbable crashing of a spy satellite on a Yeti nest are all intriguing rather than improbable dénouements.
Kerr is enjoying considerable success selling his novels to Hollywood, and that must be in large part due to his workmanlike approach to fiction. He takes good plots (What if a computerised build- ing started killing people? What if they really did find a Yeti?) and makes one feel that he has been thinking about little else since he was born. His writing is not inspired, but it is invariably engross- ing.
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