‘Jaws’ – Peter Benchley’s first and most famous novel

When someone mentions Jaws, people will most likely think of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 adaptation of the novel with the same title. That novel was written by Peter Benchley (1940-2006) and was published just one year before the movie was out. Unfortunately, the author did not rise to my expectations, and thus Benchley’s Jaws is among the few novels that are not as good as their movie adaptation (another one being The 13^th Warrior by Michael Crichton).

Jaws is a fast read and it hooks the reader from the very first page when “the fish,” a great white shark, feeds on a swimmer in the waters of Amity, a seaside resort on Long Island, New York. Although Police Chief Martin Brody wants to keep the beaches closed, his decision is overruled by the town’s mayor and his cronies. Only when the shark kills more people is Brody taken seriously.

With the arrival of Matt Hooper, an ichthyologist from a research institute, the novel had all the ingredients to continue its interesting story. But, Peter Benchley strays away from the main plot, the one that until now kept me, as a reader, interested in the storyline, and chooses to spend about one hundred pages on a love affair between Brody’s wife and Hooper. Although there are other subplots (such as the mafia behind the mayor’s business, a subplot which is never brought to a satisfactory conclusion), Benchley chooses to go into details regarding a brief love affair that has nothing to do with the shark or the town.

Apart from this, the writer annoyingly describes in great detail what each character is wearing, going to all the trouble of informing the reader what colour the fisherman’s socks are and what the logo on the polo shirt looked like. To be honest, all I wanted to read about was the shark, the killings, and the hunt. Basically, you could easily skip the middle of the book without the fear of not reading anything important regarding the shark.

Eventually, Brody, Hooper and Quint, a professional shark fisherman who employs unorthodox methods in order to lure the great white to the surface, go out at sea in search for the killer shark. Their struggle at the sea, fighting both against their doubts and the forces of nature, reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea. But soon, the hunters become the hunted and Hooper meets his end in his shark cage where he was trying to photograph the shark and shoot it with a bang stick.

Brody, not a man who felt in his element on the open sea, insists on cancelling the hunt but, by this time, Quint took the hunt personally and couldn’t abandon it. His obsession with catching the shark somewhat mirrors Captain Ahab’s in Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick. And just like Mody-Dick, the shark succeeds in killing all the hunters with the exception of Brody, who “raised his head [from the water], cleared his eyes, and sighted in the distance the black point of the water tower. Then he began to kick towards shore.”

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