The Experiment

From Barnes & Noble

With the birth of Dolly the sheep, the 20th century's greatest (some say potentially most destructive) scientific advancement was realized. In The Experiment, the groundbreaking novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and Neanderthal author John Darnton, our greatest fears about cloning come horrifically to fruition.

Denver Rocky Mountain News

In books like Jurassic Park and The Andromeda Strain, Michael Crichton has demonstrated a unique knack for melding an acute understanding of cutting-edge science with white-knuckles suspense. In The Experiment, John Darnton goes one better. The Experiment is well-versed in the science it presents, offering more than a few discourses on everything from the mechanics of cloning to the causes of rare diseases like Hutchinson-Gilford syndrome.

To describe the plot in further detail would spoil the fun. Suffice it to say that the book is packed with delicious twists. Moreover, the author does such an impressive job of manipulating our allegiance that halfway through the book, we're not sure whom we're rooting for.

Darnton has written a gripping, at times harrowing cautionary tale about the inherent dangers of coupling cutting-edge science with too much money and power. A first rate thriller.

Talk10

In the summer of 1996, John Darnton, the Pulitzer Prize-winning London bureau chief for The New York Times, asked Keith Campbell, a researcher at Scotland's Roslin Institute whether he thought it possible to clone a creature from adult cells-in other words, to genetically copy a mature animal. Campbell, who had cloned sheep from the cells of a lamb embryo, "gave a slight, funny smile and said, 'Anything's possible,'" Darnton recalls.

It turned out that Campbell and his colleagues had already cloned the now-famous Dolly, in the experiment that pulled the prospect of human cloning out of the realm of science fiction. But Darnton didn't learn about this feat until almost six months later-when he read about it in his own newspaper. He had missed one of the biggest stories of the decade. "I don't usually brag about that one," he says with a laugh.

But the trip wasn't a total loss: It provided the inspiration for Darnton's new novel, The Experiment (Dutton, $24.95), an X-Files-like tale of a search for immortality gone awry, complete with confused coroners, FBI-wary FBI agents, a Fox Mulder-esque protagonist and his beautiful physician sidekick, and a group called "W"-"double you"-that makes cloned kids for spare parts to prolong the lives of their adult prototypes. —Jon Cohen

Publishers Weekly

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 subject--and future bedmate--is 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. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 5/1/99.]--Roland C. Person, Southern Illinois Univ. Lib., Carbondale Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

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 clichés, a plot that doesn't add up, and undistinguished characters about whose stock actions it•s difficult to care. (Literary Guild main selection)