by Steve Alten
421 pages, Apelles
Review by Hereward L.M. Proops
I saw a movie last year called “Ninja
Assassin”. It was full of flashy special effects, gratuitous violence and, of
course, ninjas. In the opening sequence a man has his face sliced in half and
the ending has SWAT police armed with assault rifles raiding a ninja temple in
the mountains. It was utter crap but if I was ten years old, I'd probably think
it was the greatest movie ever made.
I feel the same way about Steve Alten's “Meg”.
Alten's bonkers best-seller caused quite a stir when it was first released in
1997. The movie rights were quickly snapped up and a number of sequels have
enjoyed similar success. Interestingly, the movie has been stranded in
development hell and the rights to the adaptation have changed hands numerous
times. From the moment I picked up the tattered paperback copy of “Meg” I knew
that if nothing else, I was going to be entertained. Any book that opens with a
T-Rex fighting a giant shark is going to get my inner-geek ludicrously excited.
For those who don't know, “Meg” is about a
Megalodon, a breed of enormous prehistoric shark that has evaded extinction by
hiding out deep in the Mariana trench. When one of the monster sharks makes its
way out of the deep waters into the Pacific Ocean, it's up to disgraced Navy
submarine-pilot Jonas Taylor to track it down. Taylor's own career hit the
skids years previously when a dive into the trench went disastrously wrong and
led to the death of two colleagues. His account of the giant shark he spotted
deep in the trench was dismissed by his superiors as a hallucination. Jonas
spent the subsequent years researching the giant sharks at the expense of both
his credibility and his marriage. This knowledge comes in pretty handy when the
sixty-foot fishy emerges from the depths.
Anyone with the slightest grasp of
storytelling can guess where the story goes from here. Of course, readers don't
pick up a book about a rampaging giant shark looking for a complex narrative.
There's plenty of bloodshed and nautical mayhem to keep ten year old readers
entertained. Whales are ripped apart, yachts are snacked upon and there is a
particularly silly sequence involving a surfer riding a wave whilst the
Megalodon snaps at his heels. It's clear to see why the studios were keen to
buy the movie rights before the book even hit the shelves. However, as one
moves from predictable set-piece to predictable set-piece it becomes apparent
why production of the movie kept getting stalled. There's very little in this
novel that we haven't seen before both on page and on the silver screen.
Naturally, comparisons are going to be made with Peter Benchley's “Jaws” and
the cinematic incarnations of the legendary Great White shark. Alten's
functional storytelling lacks the undercurrent of tension and horror that made
Benchley's novel so memorable and the one-dimensional characterisation means
that we never really care for Alten's protagonists in the same way we do for
the bickering crew of the Orca in Spielberg's classic movie.
I did enjoy “Meg” whilst it lasted and I
saw the story through to the end. Sadly, not even the fantastically silly
climax inside the shark's digestive tract was able to salvage the novel from
being anything other than an amusing distraction. When all is said and done, “Meg”
might well aim to be a high-concept blockbuster but it is sadly lacking in
bite.
Hereward L.M. Proops
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