Indiana Jones And The Dinosaur Eggs

A pleasant piece of pulp, even if it doesn't reach that level of magical pulp that infuses the Indiana Jones movies. The novels in this franchise are a known quantity: they're only for fans craving a little more, and there's an unspoken acceptance that they can't be anything other than a pale imitation of the real thing. You know none of them are going to blow you away. There's no chance of the reader unearthing a hidden gem – that's a feat that remains exclusively reserved for everyone's favourite treasure-hunting archaeologist.

Accepting this, then, the reader settles down for a routine Indiana Jones thrill, and that's what they get. The MacGuffin is an interesting one: the prospect of live dinosaurs in unexplored Mongolia, and of a show more 'missing link' tribe of Stone Age humans. It is, in essence, an agreeable and simplified mix of Lost Horizon and Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World. Even allowing for the obligatory skirmish with the Nazis in the bookend chapters, Dinosaur Eggs felt like something other than just a rehash of standard Indiana Jones tropes. Hypervigilant fans will nit-pick that Indy doesn't always seem like the Indy we know and love, but I quite liked how fresh it all felt.

Having said that, it is the least of the three Indy novels by Max McCoy that I've read (I've yet to open Secret of the Sphinx). It's a disappointment that Indy doesn't have to do much (if anything) in the way of puzzle-solving or questing; he only has to journey to a place, fight, then journey back. On my shelf, Dinosaur Eggs is noticeably slimmer than the other McCoy novels: it rushes through its plot, its character conflicts and its resolutions to Indy's predicaments. The storytelling is a bit artless: any tension is bled out by its hastiness, and we aren't allowed to pause even for a moment to savour the wonder at the 'lost world' Indy discovers.

But, in the end, any flaws in the book are easily forgiven, because it's an Indiana Jones book. You could just write the sentence "It's an Indiana Jones adventure" and have covered all the necessary bases for a review. To people thinking about reading this, the quality almost doesn't matter. You'll read Indiana Jones and the Dinosaur Eggs only if you have an itch to scratch – and this it satisfies. show less