I Fear Your Experiment was a Failure, Mr. Darnton
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Author: John Darnton
Title: The Experiment Genre: mystery What could a twenty-five year-old who's been living a sequestered life off the southern US Atlantic coast possibly have in common with a thirty year old newspaper reporter living in the heart of New York City? You'd be surprised at how much the two of them have in common -- they certainly are, once they meet. When young Skyler makes a break from the only home he's ever known and escapes to the "outside world," it's a string of coincidences that leads him to the doorstep of a man who looks, walks, talks, and even thinks like him -- except that this man is five years older than Skyler. Even more disturbing, though, these two men are -- except for the niggling detail of age difference -- identical all the way down to the genetic level! How could such a thing happen? And why is Jude finding other people in the same boat, except that one of the pair usually turns up dead? Could there be duplicate copies of everybody out there, and we just don't know it? There are, to be certain, a lot of duplicates back on the island Skyler fled from -- including one of Jude's girlfriend... The biggest question of all, though, is "Who is the mysterious Dr. Rincon, and what is the purpose of the grand experiment carried out in his name?" Wouldn't you just like to know? On The Run Jude, Skyler, and Jude's new sweetie, Tizzie -- a medical researcher, believe it or not, who specializes in twins -- set out to answer these and all the other questions. Their quest leads the three to the abandoned mining camp in Arizona where Jude was born into a scientific cult thirty years ago. It takes them into the wilds of New York City, and to the ruins of "The Lab," Skyler's former island home, as they close in on their quarry. Through it all, the little band of friends is relentlessly pursued by at least two sets of hunters: the mysterious Orderlies, sociopathic enforcers for The Lab; and a band of rogue FBI agents as well. Rincon's sinister experimentation, it seems, has friends in high places -- some of the highest places, in fact. It's up to our three heroes to bring Rincon's experiment to a screeching halt. Readers are treated to double- and triple-crosses, gruesome murder-mutilations, an autopsy (although in nowhere near the detail of a Scarpetta case), plus a host of situations that might have been lifted straight out of "The Parent Trap."* It's not a pretty sight. It's not a pretty book. A First-Order Derivative Nothing in John Darnton's The Experiment is particularly new; most of the plot elements have been written before (many of them better). This business of human cloning carried out in the 60's? See if you can find a copy of Tracy Kidder's Joshua, Son of None, where it was done far better. So there's a conspiracy of powerful forces including judges, lawmen, legislators, and power-hungry industrialists? Heck, that's the plot of almost every Robert Ludlum novel, and some of them were pretty darned good (before Ludlum went nuts for italics). A lovers under pressure theme? That's been written perhaps a million times... A doppelganger theme? how many variations on "it was like looking in a mirror" can an author write, huh? This is all ground that's been well and thoroughly plowed before; you can get a bellyfull of any of these plot elements just about anywhere. Sorry, Mr. Darnton, but your plot's derivative on almost every front, except perhaps your penchant for strange names. I mean, Skyler? Tizzie? Any Redeeming Qualities? So what, if anything, does The Experiment have going for it? Well, it's mindless and a quick read for a five-hundred-page novel. The characters are written well enough, and Darnton took great pains to give Skyler and Jude fairly distinct personalities -- enough so that a major plot twist pivots on their differences. The action moves at a relatively quick pace -- not frantic, but quick -- and the plot is for the most part reasonable. It's a bit unbelievable for Jude and Tizzie to have advanced so far in their careers at a relatively young age, but still within the realms of possibility. Too, Darnton has done a good job of reducing the scientific jargon of cloning and genetic engineering to the level of a Sunday supplement article. But, then, that's pretty much what Darnton does for a living -- edit Sunday supplement articles. I had hoped for an interesting yarn, along the lines of Darnton's earlier work Neanderthal, but was disappointed by this effort. Overall Want a fast-paced thriller that won't much tax your brain? This'll do. But if you want innovative fiction, plots on the cutting edge of both science and mystery, I'd suggest looking elsewhere. * 1960s Disney movie (starring Hayley Mills) remade in the 2000s, about a pair of twins separated at birth by their parents' divorce all content copyright © 2014 by scmrak
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