Non-Shark
Thrillers From The Creator of Jaws
Review
by Pat Black
It’s
the 40th anniversary of the original Jaws movie, but I cannot write anything about either the book or
the film which hasn’t been covered here already.
I
can, however, write about Peter Benchley’s other watery thrillers. So let’s
hold our noses, and jump in.
The Deep (1976)
Following
Jaws was a tall order. How do you
move on from a book that sold millions of copies and spawned a cultural
juggernaut?
The
author was wise to focus on underwater menace, though I can imagine he may well
have been nudged into more oceanic adventures through the entreaties of his
agent and publishers. Although Benchley loved the sea and the creatures that
live there, as a writer he might not have liked being lowered into the “sharks
guy” or the “ocean thrillers guy” cage.
Commercial
logic dictated that he should stick to a winning formula, and so we got The Deep, hitting bookstores a year
after Jaws became a monster at the
box office. The iron was hot, and Benchley had another hit.
If
you say the word “Jaws” to people, you’d assume most people would think of a shark.
But you’ll most likely hear any number of associations, from John Williams’
score to the Orca to Robert Shaw’s Indianapolis speech, to needing a bigger
boat, to some bad hat Harry, to the mayor’s extraordinary anchor-pattern sports
jacket, to (enough. Enough!!!)…
However,
if you mention “The Deep” to people, then you will most likely be given two
points of reference, both of which reside underneath Jacqueline Bissett’s wet
t-shirt. Thanks to Peter Yates’ movie version which appeared a year later, the
English rose provided a cinematic vision of sweaty-palmed male lust arguably on
a par with Anita Ekberg frolicking in the Trevi Fountain, or Raquel Welch in a
furry bikini. It’s a painfully sexist concept, but it did its job, which was to
publicise the movie. When asked about this aspect of The Deep years later, Benchley diplomatically and even gallantly
described Bisset as “a very brave and game lady” - who was well aware of the
attention that her famous wet t-shirt shots would bring her.
This
is a shame, because The Deep is a
taut thriller, perfect holiday reading. It follows David and Gail Sanders, a young
couple on a Scuba diving honeymoon in Bermuda. They discover a wartime wreck,
and inside they find an “ampoule” filled with liquid, which turns out to be weapon-grade
morphine. The wreck is filled with these.
Word
gets around back on the island, and the couple are menaced by a local gangster,
Cloche, who wants to know the location of this underwater drugs gold-mine.
Luckily, the couple are helped by local character and wreck salvage expert
Romer Treece to vacuum up the ampoules strewn around the wreck. It turns out
that there’s something else down there, beneath the 1940s wreck; a sunken
galleon, loaded with treasure.
There’s
plenty of underwater thrills, including a few shark moments. Benchley had to
include a monster, though, and in this story it’s a giant Moray eel which darts
out of a hidey-hole in the wreck to snack on unwary divers. The Deep is an enjoyable, fast-paced
adventure story and a fine follow-up to Jaws
(or at least, as good as Benchley could have hoped).
We
have to talk about sex, though.
In
Jaws, Hooper and Ellen Brody’s affair
is a jarring moment, a curious emasculation of the novel’s hero, Chief Brody.
The pair’s bar-room chat in the lead-up to doing the naughty is cringe-worthy
stuff, featuring rape fantasies which seem to spool off into the actual sex
itself, going by Ellen’s recollection of it. The Deep features a similar sense of the book’s hero being
symbolically cuckolded. Two scenes are noteworthy in this regard, both of which
made it into the movie. In one part, David and Gail are captured by Cloche’s
henchmen and made to strip, ostensibly to make sure they aren’t hiding any
magic ampoules in their shorts and sandals. Benchley describes the palpable
lust of the men as Gail takes her clothes off, even going so far as to show
David becoming involuntarily excited by this scenario, and implanting the
phrase “absurd tumescence” into my psyche forevermore.
The
pair are subsequently let go, but there’s another scene in which the hero’s
wife is stripped and assaulted as part of a weird voodoo ritual. “They didn’t rape
me,” is the first thing Gail says when David and Treece find out she’s been
attacked, after having been diving at the wreck site.
It’s
a bit odd. And rapey.
The Deep is
long out of print, but is worth seeking out second-hand. As we saw in Jaws, and as we shall see elsewhere
here, Benchley had a talent for the big finish. Although the shark’s death in
his novel wasn’t as eye-catching as it was in Steven Spielberg’s film, Jaws had a thrilling finale and a narrow
escape for the hero. The same is true in The
Deep, which finishes on an exclamation mark.
The Island (1979)
“Okay,
we’ve done sharks, we’ve done treasure hunting… What’s next, Peter? Pirates?
Guffaw!”
Indeed,
pirates.
Finishing
the 1970s on the crest of a wave, Benchley’s next book looked to adventure
above the surface. The Island’s main
character, Blair Maynard, is a journalist on the hunt for his next haaat
scooooop. He gets wind of several strange shipping disappearances in the Bermuda
Triangle. So, of course, he goes on an assignment to see if modern day pirates
are behind the mystery which plagues this tropical paradise.
That
distant crackling sound you just heard was the derisory laughter of thousands
of journalists, for whom the idea of such an “assignment” on their day job
really is the stuff of fiction.
Ironically,
this may not quite have been the case in the late 1970s, a period which
old-timers in journalism refer to as the “golden age”. There was lots of money
to be earned, being drunk at work was positively encouraged, you could actually
make a living from freelancing and, yes, some people did get sent to strange
and exotic places for the sake of a miserable two-page spread on pages 10 and
11. The words “paid sabbatical” were also uttered with the utmost seriousness
by some staffers in those days, whereas today they are mentioned in the same
context as “Bigfoot”, “Loch Ness Monster” and “trickle-down economics”.
So,
Maynard takes his young son on this assignment, only to discover – shiver me
timbers! –there are indeed pirates patrolling these waters. They duly get
captured by… Well… Now, hold on a minute.
Fantasies
of front-line journalism aside, The
Island was doing okay up until this point. Benchley was getting away with
it. Even in these days of GPS tracking, sophisticated homing devices and
improved search and rescue systems, ships can still go missing in remote
places, and we all know about the reality of modern-day piracy. So, up until
this point, Benchley had a potentially exciting novel on his hands. Editors
would have sat up and taken notice; perhaps they’d even have scribbled some
notes. Imagine a tense pursuit at sea, with fearsome gun-toting brigands,
involving drugs, people-trafficking and simple bloody-mindedness on the high
seas, as the goodies have to fight to survive. Not a bad premise at all.
Unfortunately,
Benchley takes a wrong turn, at a basic conceptual level. His pirate novel is
peopled by… actual pirates.
Not
tense, stringy modern-day menaces with Uzis and machetes, but actual, “Yo ho ho
and a bottle of rum, ahaaaaarggggh me beauties”, eyepatches, peg legs, parrots
and cutlasses pirates.
The
gang is a bizarre sect living under the guiding hand of the fearsome Captain
Nau, descended from an original 17th century pirate, living by the
same customs and rules. As a result they are unwashed, genetically compromised
and sexually bizarre, and make Tom Baker’s old sea dog in Blackadder seem like your favourite uncle.
Plus…
if The Deep had a little trickle of rape
about some of its scenes, then The Island
is drenched in it. Women and children? Raped. Blokes? Raped. Animals? Inanimate
objects? Fresh air? Probably raped.
Possibly
Benchley was aiming to portray the type of rape n’ pillage activities that were
all the rage among most seafaring rogues from the Vikings onwards, but this all
seems dreadfully unnecessary.
Bizarre
scene follows bizarre scene, ranging from a strange albino pilot who
accompanies Maynard on the early part of his journey who gets pissed at the
helm and crashes his plane, to that crucial “fish oil enema” passage where the
whole of Pirate Island defecates for an entire chapter.
You
read that right. Fish oil enemas. Freestyle sh*tting. Don’t all rush to eBay at
once.
The
novel hinges on a strange tug of love between Mayard, his son Justin and
Captain Nau, the big baddie. Justin is recruited into the ranks of Nau’s community
for the sake of new blood. Rather than being slaughtered like everyone else,
Maynard is allowed to live because, for all-too-convenient reasons, Nau
discovers he has pirate blood in him, and to kill him would be against the
pirate code of conduct, or something.
Maynard
consoles himself with a native girl while Justin has a Lord of the Flies style
experience with his new pirate buddies, changing his loyalties while Maynard
looks on, aggrieved and yet sexually fulfilled with his concubine.
I
don’t often say this on Booksquawk, and I’m also saying it about a man whose
work has had a big effect on my life: The
Island is a dreadful novel.
I
first read it when I was 16 after having picked it out from a second-hand bookshop
in Partick, and even at that less-than-sensitive age I was scratching my head
at its perverse absurdity. Benchley, who comes from American literary
aristocracy, including his grandfather, the humourist Robert Benchley, and his father,
Nathaniel, and was himself more than capable of turning out a fine sentence, must
have known he had written an absolute gobbler.
Maybe
it was a lazy hack job written out of contractual obligation; the same scenario
as when bands go through the motions to fulfil a restrictive record contract,
with a view to getting a better one later on, or splitting up for more
lucrative solo careers.
Whatever
the reasons for its existence, this book is silly and outright bizarre, with
some worrying preoccupations. If it was written as a joke, then it falls flat
on its face. The kind of quip you’d make after a few drinks at a party, drawing
flat silences and tense faces, following which you simply have to leave.
What
strikes me as particularly astonishing about The Island is that, in spite of its patent absurdity, it was
quickly optioned for film rights, and was actually made as a movie in 1980,
starring Michael Caine.
Caine
has had an amazing career, but it was never more interesting than in the 1980s.
Although this decade saw him win his first Oscar for Hannah and Her Sisters and also appear in great films like Mona Lisa, Educating Rita and even Dirty
Rotten Scoundrels, he didn’t half make some dreadful shite to pay the
bills. The Island, which bellyflopped
at the box office, qualifies on this front.
Of
course, there’s another Benchley link to consider, as Jaws: The Revenge lurks on Caine’s CV. Indeed, he famously couldn’t
turn up to receive his Academy Award in 1987 because he was shooting that great
white turkey in the Bahamas at the time. There’s an oft-repeated quote attached
to Caine, in which the actor reportedly said that he had never seen Jaws: The Revenge, but he had seen the
house he built thanks to his salary.
It’s
alright for some, me old china.
One
thing I will say in its favour: like Jaws
and The Deep, The Island has an abrupt, thrilling and unexpected climax as
Maynard goes toe-to-stump with Captain Nau. It’s not worth the journey, though,
unless you’re the kind of person who enjoys looking at photos of crime scenes.
Beast (1991)
Maybe
as a result of the brain-quaking stupidity of The Island, Peter Benchley didn’t return to oceanic thrillers for
another 12 years. He put out The Girl of
the Sea of Cortez (more on that later), a watery modern-day fable, and then
went on dry land for Rummies, aka Lush (although there’s a lot of wet
stuff in that book), as well as the political novel Q Clearance. Although it appears that these books get closer to the
heart of Peter Benchley as the writer he wanted to be, they didn’t sell very
well.
I
guess he’d been badgered… wrong animal; let’s say piranhaed… for years to write
“something like Jaws”. He duly
delivered in 1991 with the story of another sea monster, the giant squid, in Beast.
Beast (later
renamed The Beast, for whatever
reason), takes place in Bermuda, and sees a monster filling its suckers with
hapless Scuba divers and pleasure boaters. Benchley, who often seemed afflicted
by guilt or regret over the effect Jaws
supposedly had on demonising sharks, was careful to lay the blame for his latest
monster mash on environmental concerns. The harmony of the sea has been
unbalanced by over-fishing, which leads creatures like Architeuthis Dux - usually found loitering in the deep sea to give
sperm whales nookie badges - into changing its habits. The monster creeps ever
closer to the surface, and finally butts mantles with humanity.
There’s
even a little meta-commentary, as the characters discuss Jaws as the fiction it is, and debate its effect on how sharks are viewed.
If Benchley was trying to distance himself from Jaws – in a book about a man-eating sea beast, no less - then he
might at least have tried to do the same with his plot, which is in some cases
near-identical to its piscine predecessor.
The
marauding cephalopod won’t go away, and thusly needs to be hunted and killed.
Whip Darling (Benchley had a way with names) is our hero, a grizzled fishing
boat captain with money worries who is paid, and then blackmailed, to take part
in the search for the monster after it eats a millionaire’s children. Darling
is grumpy like Quint, but less psychotic. Also on hand is a shifty marine
biologist who sees a chance to make a name for himself in the scientific
journals, as well as Darling’s military mate, and the Ahab-esque millionaire,
hell-bent on killing the monster. Wonder how that’s going to pan out?
Things
lead, rather predictably, to a hunter-becomes-the-hunted scenario at sea, with
yet another unexpected, sudden, memorable climax.
It
isn’t Jaws, but it’s very like Jaws, with easily recognisable beats and
well-written scenes of seagoing peril. Also, Benchley had finally learned his
lesson, and there’s no bad sex waiting to pounce on unwary doggie-paddlers. You
know exactly what to expect with Beast,
but I liked it for that, and fans of Jaws
should check it out.
White
Shark/Creature (1994)
Benchley had the
very devil of a time with titles. Rummies,
a strange blend of alcoholism memoir and murder mystery, is also known as Lush; even Beast got a “The” added to it in later editions.
Famously, Jaws was almost never Jaws at all - Benchley came up with a
load of titles which didn't quite cut it, such as Leviathan Rising, The Stillness In The Water, and Aaargh Big Fishie Stop Biting Me! One of
these may be a lie.
Creature, as I know it, was originally entitled White Shark. This book does not
primarily concern a white shark (although one appears, called, er, Jaws). The
title was changed to tie in with the TV movie adaptation of 1997, but it also
helped gentle down some people who may have bought the book when it came out and
complained, expecting it to be about, you know, the thing in the title.
It's a B-movie homage, featuring a genetically-spliced
human/shark hybrid monster, created by those pesky Nazis. The Third Reich is a
good stand-by if you need a villain everyone can get their teeth into without
any political awkwardness. Hell, we were even friends with the Russians in 1994,
so they were out - though around about this time Michael Crichton decided to
take a pop at the Japanese for their business practises (?!!?).
The creature is a secret underwater
weapon put together during some Josef Mengele-style experiments, with steel
claws for hands and the jaws of a great white shark. This Nazi science uber-carnage
programme was called “Der Weisse Hai”, which is why Benchley, or more likely
his publishers, went for the original title. Obviously.
How about The Bullshi*t In The Water, or Jobbies
Rising?
It's a fun beach read. Research
scientists; Long Island setting; bit of ecology focusing on cute seals, a
pregnant shark, a bit of romance... Curiously, the father-son bonding dynamic
of The Island is explored again,
though thankfully we dispense with pirate craziness and rape this time out. People
do die but it's a decent family drama, with added monster - a nice sea change
from Benchley's earlier dark, adult storylines.
The book keeps its monster well
hidden, with the author perhaps taking his cue from Spielberg, only revealing
it to us at the end. I must confess I had to be reminded of how the story
concludes. It’s confectionery, but I recall it was a serviceable enough
thriller that merrily swims in the same pool as its better-known peers.
This was Benchley's last piece of
fiction. He spent the rest of his life pursuing his conservation interests, and
although he did turn out a few more books on sharks, they're true-life pieces,
mostly focusing on how to keep the critters alive in a world which seems intent
on finning the lot of them. He died in 2006, aged 65.
Just the other day I read a piece on how
Benchley supposedly helped make the world unnecessarily frightened of sharks.
That article got on my wick, and prompted this one.
This isn't said enough about Peter
Benchley: he was neither responsible for the demonisation of sharks, nor is he
the reason why many species are endangered. We've been frightened of sharks
forever, so it's disingenuous to suggest this was something that began in 1975.
They were not regarded as cute and cuddly prior to Jaws. They were also well-known symbols of menace and fear
throughout mainstream fictions, long before Our Bruce ever thrashed popular
culture into bloody foam. Just read Jules Verne, or Herman Melville, if
you don’t believe me.
The reason is simple: sharks are
dangerous animals. We know that attacks are very rare and that they don't
really want to eat humans - but sometimes, they do. That’s the juice.
We are fascinated by our great
predators. Like the eagle or the tiger, a shark is an instantly recognisable
creature, a thing of fearful symmetry. We love it for that. Jaws has a very rare, inter-generational
cultural cache, tapping into our very psyche. The idea of being eaten alive by
a fish is something out of our nightmares. But I'd argue the story’s influence
on sharks has been, ultimately, positive.
The environmental obscenity of
finning and over-fishing has nothing to do with Jaws. The white shark may well have been more prized by sports
anglers in the immediate aftermath of Jaws,
and certainly its gnashers would have been seen by some dullards as a trophy
worth putting on the mantelpiece. But these folk are in a small minority
compared to people like me, who grew up in the teeth of Jaws, and were awestruck by the creature portrayed.
I became more interested in sharks
not as dumb brutes to be slaughtered, but as things worthy of respect, even
affection. I grew up obsessed by sharks, and I’ll still clear my schedule for a
spot of shark porn any time nature documentaries are screened. Jaws is the reason for this.
As Jaws continues to enjoy what Benchley described as “a strange
cultural resonance”, so its positive influence grows. People young and old love
sharks, and we don't want to see them wiped out. After fascination, came
education; we know so much more about these creatures now than we did in 1975.
Benchley's big fish story should start
to take some credit for all of this. Certainly he was a tireless advocate of
marine conservation for much of his life, and he deserves recognition for that,
too.
There’s one more sea-themed book
which Benchley released, but it was a bit of a departure: The Girl Of The Sea of Cortez. It’s a gentle love letter to the
ocean, and many people have told me it’s his best book. I’ll have to
investigate.
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