Subject: Review: RAPTOR RED

From: [email-masked]
Date: Tue, 21 Nov 1995 18:32:26 GMT

RAPTOR RED by Robert T. Bakker
                    A book review by Mark R. Leeper
		    Copyright 1995 Mark R. Leeper

     I suppose it was a matter of time before someone wrote a book like
RAPTOR RED.  It is a perennial natural science topic to take some animal of
interest and write a story of the animal's life for one year.  I believe
there is a book called THE YEAR OF THE RABBIT, though I don't know the
author.  Victor Scheffer wrote a similar book called THE YEAR OF THE WHALE
(copyright 1969).  Then there is Hank Searls's SOUNDING (1982), a novel that
took the reader into the mind of a sperm whale.  Searls may have exaggerated
a bit on cetacean intelligence (my favorite line was having the whales
remember World War II as the time when the oceans were noisy), but he did
give a feel for the point of view of a whale.  Of course James Oliver
Curwood's THE BEAR (originally THE GRIZZLY KING) was adapted successfully
into a film.  It was a matter of time before somebody like Robert Bakker,
author of THE DINOSAUR HERESIES and one of the two or three most popular
American experts on dinosaurs, wrote a description of life in the time of
dinosaurs (in this case the early Cretaceous) in a novel-length story.  Eric
Temple Bell (who wrote science fiction under the name John Taine) wrote a
1934 novel, BEFORE THE DAWN, which was very much along the same lines.  He
has scientists viewing the prehistoric past with a sort of time scanner, but
the main characters are dinosaurs.  Bakker has taken his view of the early
Cretaceous and describes the life, mind, and emotions he envisions a
Utahraptor would have.  A Utahraptor is a raptor the size of those in the
film JURASSIC PARK.  Bakker was an advisor on that film and apparently told
the special effects people that they should go ahead and portray raptors of
the size they were in the film.  That was larger than any raptors that had
been found at the time.  He said to go ahead and portray them that large,
because it was likely that there might have been raptors that big that just
had not yet been discovered.  Coincidentally, by the time the film was
released or shortly thereafter fossils of Utahraptor were discovered that
were the right size.

     It is difficult to write a really adult story realistically from an
animal's point of view.  It almost always comes out at about teenage level
at most.  RAPTOR RED does have violence and sex.  The former is considerably
more graphic than the latter, but I think neither is any worse than what
plays on cable.  And on cable it is humans who are doing it.  So this book
is probably suitable for a ten-year-old, and because it is salted with
Bakker's theories about dinosaurs and presumably is a fairly accurate
representation of the period, it is not too juvenile to be read by an adult.

     The structure is a little too much like THE BEAR in that the title
dinosaur suffers a loss at the beginning that leaves her unattached.  The
cub in THE BEAR lost his mother, and here the title character's mate is
careless in making a kill and has his intended prey fall on him.  The book
is the account of how Raptor Red travels with her sister and looks for a
mate.  Along the way she has to fight off creatures like the giant sauropod
called a whip-tail, allosaurus-like acros, and deinonychs.  Thankfully,
there are few of the dinosaurs that we had plastic models of as kids.  That
would be a sort of name-dropping, I suppose.  She also has to face a flood,
but no volcanos.  We see how she hunts, what she looks for in a mate, and a
great deal of the family life behavior that Bakker theorizes.

     Probably the book would have been more rewarding if it had been clearer
which theories Bakker was challenging.  I think a dinosaur expert might see
more controversial ideas in the book than the uninitiated would catch.  Each
chapter starts with a sketch of some animal who will be appearing and (I
discovered too late in my reading) there is also a drawing toward the end of
the book depicting all the dinosaurs drawn to scale.

     While I have read more rewarding books, this one serves its function.
It might make a good holiday gift for some teenager who likes dinosaurs.  Of
course $21.95 is just a little on the hefty side for a less than hefty
novel.

%T      Raptor Red
%A      Robert T. Bakker
%C      New York
%D      October 1995
%I      Bantam
%O      hardback, US$21.95
%G      ISBN 0-553-10124-2
%P      246pp
					Mark R. Leeper
					[email-masked]