The term "high concept" is used to describe a film whose plot can be summarised in one line for the benefit of the easily confused. Thus Jurassic Park is "dinosaurs run wild in a theme park", Disclosure is "man sexually harassed by his female boss" and Rising Sun is "nasty Japanese take our jobs and kill our women".
It's no coincidence that all three of these films derived from books by Michael Crichton, for Crichton - creator of ER and himself a sometime director - is the ultimate high-concept novelist. True to form, Timeline, his twelfth novel, can be summarised as: "People from the 20th century go back to the 14th, and find that it's not very nice". The End. That'll be £16.99, please.
Jolly old Professor Johnston finds himself trapped in France during the Hundred Years War, thanks to a time machine designed (for no particularly good reason) by the sinister ITC corporation, and three of his plucky students have to travel back to 1357 to save him. This gives the students the opportunity to joust, lop heads off with swords, blow things up and run across rooftops while being chased by bad guys dressed in black. It's a "bad guys wear black" kind of book.
In truth, Timeline is a revised version of Crichton's own film, Westworld, in which tourists could visit a theme park based on medieval life and populated by robots. Unfortunately, having largely dispensed with originality, Crichton then proceeds to jettison plot, pacing, plausibility and characterisation, all of which are considered inessential to the concept. There are characters in Timeline who could only claim to be two-dimensional if they borrowed one dimension from a friend.
At his best, as in The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, Crichton is an excellent popular novelist with compulsive appeal, bolstering his sometimes functional prose with impeccable research and cutting-edge science. Timeline has the research (but still manages to confuse Old and Middle English), some speculative science and a certain ingenuity, but all set adrift from anything that could stand up in court and call itself a plot.
In the end, Crichton's book is designed to be read in about three hours, giving the reader enough time to catch a short nap and the end of the in-flight movie before landing. In fact, pretty soon Timeline will be the inflight movie, and then you won't have to read the book at all.
John Connolly's new novel, Dark Hollow, is published by Hodder & Stoughton this month.