Fabian {Councillor}'s Reviews > Jaws

Who doesn't know the famous Spielberg movie with a shark as the big bad guy who wreaks terror on an entire town, with three men going on a mission to kill the shark before he kills even more people?



Just one year before the release of the movie, Peter Benchley's novel Jaws was published which the movie was adapted from. (Personal confession here: I never watched the movie, so there was nothing I could compare the events in the novel with. I practically went into it blank apart from the knowledge of a shark being around in this tale.) It's fairly easy to summarize this book: There is no heavy or particularly complex plot; you get to see the shark early on, then you are introduced to some of the main characters who live in the town the shark has focused his attention on, then the shark reappears one hundred pages later, we have a dozen unnecessary subplots again which, of course, deserve no conclusion, then the shark stops by for a few pages again and the author cuts his own book off in the middle of a scene, leaving his reader hanging in the air.

Benchley started out on a very strong premise, delving into the shark's POV and making his reader believe that the shark is actually allowed to be one of the main characters. But after the second page, we would only meet him again through the eyes of other characters - and apart from that, it all went downhill pretty fast. The author did, however, succeed at drawing a picture of society in a small town by outlining how almost everyone in this town beared prejudices towards other people and acted in a judgmental way (with the one single exception being the shark who killed without making a difference between whether his victim is old or young, black or white, rich or poor). So at least you can say one good thing about sharks: they treat human beings equally.

The novel is more about the decline of a marriage than anything else, yet it was a shark which was originally promised in the blurb, and we didn't get to see that shark for major parts of the book. I know I'm probably in the minority with my opinion, but I didn't give a damn about Matt Hooper or Ellen or Chief Brody or who they had flings with and why they betrayed each other. Benchley didn't allow his characters any depth; he just created one-dimensional, unlikeable beings which happened to be present when a shark attacked at the shore of the smalltown. What's perhaps even worse: Benchley gave the villain role to the shark, made us want to see the shark get killed, but after the first half of the book, I found myself rooting for nobody but the shark. Remember: the book is called Jaws, the cover features a shark, the premise of the novel consists of a shark attack, and yet more than half of the book is about the police chief's frustrated wife who has nothing to do at all with the shark. This basically results in the book bearing the terror of a shark attack in the 10% of the novel when the animal is actually present, and being incredibly boring and suspenseless in the other 90%.

I did manage to finish the book in the course of a few hours, but that didn't mean I liked it at all. Sometimes a premise can be as promising as this one, but if the characters don't work and the dialogue is horrible ... then there is nothing to redeem that book. Which, of course, doesn't mean that other readers might not look at this book as an amazing piece of writing. The blurb of my copy promises that "the novel reaches a climax without having a rival when it comes to tension and drama". I'll say only one thing about this: Don't believe that blurb.