The Experiment - Hardcover

Darnton, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0525945172 ISBN 13: 9780525945178

Publisher: Dutton : Penguin Group, 1999

Synopsis

Strange happenings in New York, including the discovery of a corpse with its fingerprints burned off, combine with the unexplained disappearances of people from a Southeastern island to give hints of a deadly secret scientific experiment. By the author of Neanderthal. 175,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

John Darnton has worked for more than thirty years as a reporter, editor, and foreign correspondent for The New York Times.

Reviews

The author of Neanderthal returns with a second science-drenched thriller that's as au courant as you'd expect from a veteran New York Times man (Darnton is that paper's cultural news editor). The novel is timely because it concerns human cloning; unfortunately, its plot is every bit as contrived as that scientific sleight of hand. Initially, the narrative follows two young men separately: Skyler lives on an isolated island off Georgia, on an estate called the Lab, where he has been raised according to strict dictates (enforced by hulking Orderlies) along with other boys and girls. Occasionally, a kid is taken away for medical work, or turns up dead. Now Skyler finds his girlfriend, Julia, eviscerated in the Lab's operating room, and escapes the island. At the same time, Jude Harley, a Manhattan tabloid reporter, is assigned a piece on identical twins. His main interview subjectAand future bedmateAis twin-researcher Tizzie Tierney. Down South, meanwhile, Skyler sees a photo of Jude, and tracks him down. Legwork and labwork point to Skyler being Jude's clone; Julia, it seems, was Tizzie's clone. But how, and why? Jude, Skyler and Tizzie undertake a cross-country hunt for clues, all the while hunted in turn not only by the Orderlies but by a renegade FBI faction involved in the grand conspiracy behind all the fuss. Darnton is a prize-winning reporter (including a Pulitzer), and that expertise shows in his careful employment of scientific detail about twins and cloning. His novelist's skills are less honed. The story is driven not by character, but by plot, which has a strung-out feel, featuring one chase or killing or crisis after another. Darnton's prose is impeccable but flat, while the book's climax, involving a mad doctor, is howlingly melodramatic. This novel may reflect today's news, but Ira Levin wrote a much snappier cloning thriller, The Boys from Brazil, more than 20 years ago.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Less-than-perfect biological thriller from the Pulitzer-winning journalist and author of Neanderthal (1996, not seen). On a remote barrier island, renegade scientists have secretly raised a community of young people. Kept in ignorance and disciplined by an identical trio of brutal Orderlies, the young folk are subjected to frequent medical tests and examinations. Some are then taken away only to return with organs missing; others don't come back at all. Skyler's illicit lover, Julia, disturbed and mistrustful, takes great risks attempting to learn the truth. Finally, she, too, vanishes, and Skyler finds her eviscerated corpse in the morgue. He flees from the Orderlies and stows away on the island's plane. Later, he glimpses a picture on a book jacket and realizes that the face of New York tabloid journalist and author Jude Harley is identical to his own. More astonishing yet, when Skyler makes his way to New York, Jude's lover, Dr. Elizabeth ``Tizzie'' Tierney, turns out to be Julia's double. Jude and Skyler, it emerges, don't just look like twins but are genetically identical. After various adventures, Jude, Skyler and Tizzie, harassed by Orderlies and hostile FBI agents, uncover a conspiracy, hatched by an enigmatic and elusive biology genius, to extend the lives of individuals whom Skyler's able to identify as wealthy businessmen, politicians, even the deputy director of the FBI. The islanders are their clones, bred as a source of organ transplants. Other, more ambitious experiments, however, have gone haywire, and the remaining clones may be butchered. Another part of the puzzle: why didn't the conspirators simply dispose of Jude and Tizzie when their attentions grew irksome? An extremely well-informed but tepid adventure, depending on mad-scientist clichs, a plot that doesn't add up, and undistinguished characters about whose stock actions its difficult to care. (Literary Guild main selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Darnton begins the successor to Neanderthal (1996), his best-selling maiden effort, with another intriguing, swift-paced yarn. On an island off Georgia, the Elder Physicians raise and experiment on the "jimminies." Skyler, Raisin, and Julia, three of the most alert and adventurous jimminies, are investigating what is going on in the Big House, on the rest of the island, and in the island's small Gullah community. Their forays net accurate and innacurate information and bring down some discipline on them from the Orderlies. Meanwhile, on the continent, New York Mirror reporter (and novelist) Jude Harley and twins researcher Tizzie Tierney unwittingly become involved with the Institute for Research in Human Longevity, the loosely knit group behind the programs on the island. After Raisin and Julia are killed, Skyler stows away on the island's airplane and escapes when it lands in Valdosta, Georgia. A newspaper clipping about Jude provokes Skyler to head for New York, where things start getting messy. Entering the action, the FBI splits in two, one faction supporting the institute, the other opposing it. Eventually, cloning is unveiled, done to provide spare parts, but spare parts aren't enough to guarantee long life. So what is? Darnton raises questions of considerable contemporary interest (e.g., Are human clones persons? Who has the right to clone humans?) while providing a first-rate read. William Beatty

One way to achieve longer life might be to clone people who could provide body parts when yours wear out; clandestine research might reveal better but equally diabolical ways to extend life for those willing to pay large sums. When reporter Jude Harley discovers his apparent twin, a man raised in a mysterious island colony, he joins forces with a beautiful expert on twins, and the three uncover a genetic engineering plot of monstrous proportions, extending into the government and backward into their own childhoods as part of a secret project deep in an Arizona cavern. Following his first novel, Neanderthal, bought by Steven Spielberg for seven figures, New York Times editor Darnton again combines cutting-edge science with fast-paced suspense. Skillfully popularizing medical dilemmas while juggling a variety of characters and plot lines, he makes a lurid tale seem almost possible, certainly unsettling, and probably filmable. For all public libraries.
-ARoland C. Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dutton : Penguin Group
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0525945172
• ISBN 13: 9780525945178
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 421