Eruption (2024)
By Michael Crichton and James Patterson
Little, Brown, and Company, 432 pages
★★★★ ½
Sometimes you have to forget about “literature” and evaluate a book for how well it does what the author intended. If you like heart-pounding thrillers that you rip through like a pair of ripped jeans, few have ever matched the late Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park). He died in 2008, but his widow found notes and a plot treatment for another novel (working title The Black Zone). She contacted mystery/thriller author James Patterson who went through Crichton’s files; the result is Eruption.
That’s Eruption as in volcanoes. It takes place in 2025–yes, next year–on the Big Island of Hawaii. It is home to Mauna Loa, the world’s largest active volcano, whose last major event was in 1984. It and Mauna Kei, which hasn’t blown its stack in 4,000 years are the centerpieces of Eruption and, yes, there will be considerable collateral damage.
Before the lava flows, the authors take us back in time a bit. In 1975 a secret government plan known as Project Vulcan looked into the possibility of diverting volcano flows that imperil civilians via strategic bombing. We jump ahead to 2016 when Rachel Sherrill is leading school tours at the Hilo Botanical Garden when a student notices blackened trees gone to ash. The park is immediately closed, but several days later she is dismissed and the park looks as if nothing happened.
Cut to April 2025. Thirty-six-year-old geologist Dr. James MacGregor (“Mac”) of the Hawaiian Volcano Observatory (HVO) is interrupted from his part-time gig of coaching surfing. He is flown to Honolulu by the U.S. Army to try to make sense of a partially illegible note and drawing scribbled by a retired general in a semi-vegetative state. In a debriefing, Col. James Briggs tells Mac of an ice tube in which radioactive herbicide cannisters were encased in glass and stored in 1978. Another Agent Orange-like weapon? Far more ominous.
Remember how quickly COVID spread from when you first heard of it to when people all over the globe were dying of it? This stuff is worse–so bad that if it gets out it would destroy all life on the planet in a matter of days. The bad news keeps on coming. Mac knows that a major eruption is imminent, but Briggs and his commander Gen. Mark Rivers deliver the news that if it compromises the ice tube, it’s goodbye yellow-brick road! Mac and his HVO team are charged with making sure that doesn’t happen. In other words, this is a beat-the-clock thriller, but with various twists. It’s not exactly as if a general can bark out an order and volcanoes will say, “Yes, Sir!” Plus, Mac knows that Project Vulcan was abandoned because it flopped.
Like all good thrillers, personal issues and external obstacles get in the way. The stoic Mac is about to be divorced, his team member Jenny Kimura is attracted to him, and he has a team filled with smart young people–but they are young people. Jake Rogers, a dare devil pilot, is furious that flights have been grounded and ignores the flyover ban, no one is supposed to alarm the public but the New York Times sends reporters to investigate rumors, and Oliver and Leah Cutler, two volcano-chasing TV celebrities in the vein of Crocodile Dundee demand access to the site. They are backed by tech billionaire J. P. Brett–think Elon Musk–who throws his weight around under the guise of “saving” the island.
Can Mac, General Rivers, and Houston demolitions expert Rebecca Cruz prevent Armageddon? Well… you’re reading this aren’t you? It is, however, to the credit of Crichton and Patterson that you will nonetheless grip the novel with white knuckles as you flip the pages. Eruption also manages to sneak in important themes–native peoples versus haloes (non-Hawaiians), folk beliefs and science, secrecy vis-à-vis the public’s right to know, and perhaps a backdoor slam at the madness of the Cold War.
Eruption ends rather abruptly, either because Crichton didn’t tip his hand at his ending or because Patterson wrote himself into a corner. It’s also too praiseworthy of the Army who, after all, were the reason for the problem. Yet those of a certain age might relive emotions from the Cuban Missile Crisis. Besides, it’s hard for me to slam a book whose 432 pages I read in two sittings!
Rob Weir
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