Jaws

Peter Benchley Jaws (1974)
This is probably a bit off the beaten track for me. I've never seen the movie and tend to steer clear of thrillers, but I vividly remember a copy of the Sphere paperback knocking around the house when I was a kid, so I assume my mother must have read it at some point; plus being the sort of thing I wouldn't ordinarily read, my curiosity is piqued. It's good to surprise yourself every once in a while.

Well, it isn't the relentless thriller described by the cover, unless you're thrilled by the prospect of entire chapters given over to awkward dinner parties where guests struggle to make small talk, or lengthy scenes of men who don't really like each other stood upon beaches wondering what the fuck they're going to do. In fact, I'd propose that it's not even a book about a massive shark, but will refrain from such definitive statements on the grounds that the novel itself seems to keep changing its mind about what it wants to be.

What it isn't, is a blockbusting page-turner calculated to shift units, or at least it's difficult to discern such intent within its DNA. If scoring low as poetry, Brenchley's prose is efficient and well lubricated, but with enough of a flourish to elevate the whole above what one might expect of the form, at least barring the occasional intrusion of the peculiar.

But Meadows had reason to believe that the girl was on drugs and that she was being supplied by the son of a Polish potato farmer.

Quint inexplicably yelling, I see your cock, you bastard, at the shark in chapter fourteen probably also deserves a mention here.

The characters are somewhat modular - police chief, journalist, mayor and so on - but not so much as to seem implausible; and there are a few instances of the novel being wearily of its time - notably the black rapist we hear about early on, and Ellen Brody's unlikely sexual fantasies - being raped and working as a prostitute, both ideas which seem to have crossed over from bathroom magazines of the seventies rather than from the heads of actual women. I wasn't wild about the cat being killed on whichever page it was either, but aside from these details, it's not a bad novel, just one with a bit of an identity crisis. I get the impression Benchley may have set out to write something a bit more Steinbeck given the strong focus on how the arrival of a massive shark impacts on the small town folks of Amity, those whose livelihood is very much seasonal and reliant on the annual flood of tourists. At certain points it almost feels like an ecological novel, specifically a warning, and one which seems unusually pertinent given the current pandemic. I assume there may be parallels with Moby Dick - which I haven't read - and if Jaws is a monster movie, it's the heavily allegorical 1954 version of Godzilla more than it's anything else.

This being said, Jaws switches tack to soft porn, then horror from one chapter to the next - not quite to the point of schizophrenia, but enough to let the reader know this was someone's first novel, albeit a pretty decent one in most respects. The final chapters steer a bit too close to animal-snuff for my tastes but could have been worse, and Benchley eventually regretted any influence he may have had on the subsequent gratuitous slaughter of sharks in the wild and became a conservationist.

The Stillness in the Water would have been a better title though.