Peter Benchley's Jaws - Review

Jaws by Peter Benchley

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The classic natural horror thriller that launched the modern creature feature mania.

Taking a late night swim, a young woman is fatally attacked by a great white shark off the coast of the small town of Amity.

Some authorities want the attack hushed up, but as the deaths begin to rise, police chief Brody is forced to take action, despite resistance.

As tensions in Amity escalate and the elusive predator continues to stalk them from the deep, Brody joins a mission to hunt the fish down. But the shark is waiting - and this is his ocean.

'Jaws' is the debut novel by Peter Benchley, first published in 1974, famously adapted for the screen as the 1975 film of the same name directed by Steven Spielberg. A gripping, fast-paced summer thriller, it centres on a series of shark attacks and the ensuing public hysteria, culminating in a hunt for the killer fish in a showdown of human versus beast.

At the epicentre of the narrative is Chief of Police Martin Brody, who faces the greatest challenge of his career in the aftermath of the attacks. Amity is a tourism-driven coastal community, reliant on a successful summer to survive the year. But the threat of a shark in their waters ignites a powder keg of denial and paranoia, Brody encountering resistance to closing the beaches; then more people die.

The novel also explores the impact of this pressure upon a community, and the irony of the nature of humans as social animals through class, division and prejudices, something that particularly plays into the psyche of Brody’s own wife, Ellen, seduced by the allure of a life she left behind when she got married, in the form of outsider and shark expert Matt Hooper. This is a tale of moral and political corruption, of the hubris of humanity, of the disintegration of relationships when under pressure, revealing the true nature of human beings beneath the surface of civilised humanity.

Stalking the pages like a marine angel of death, submerged beneath the waves and rarely seen, the shark lurks like an omen hanging over the community, a Leviathan inflicting its chaos, symbolic of the darkness that hides beneath the surface of a community and within the human heart. Amidst rising tensions, local fisherman Quint believes he is the man who can bring the shark down. Battling the fallout, Brody believes the only way to absolve his own guilt is to join Quint and Hooper to hunt down the shark. The attacks and the mission to hunt it down are particularly vividly realised and the glowing scenes of the novel – riveting and intense, ratcheting up the suspense and building to a final confrontation with the beast and with nature itself.

Natural horror, particularly the “creature feature”, had previously often featured cryptids, prehistoric creatures, alien life forms, genetically-enhanced mutants, preternatural and possessed monsters, but in 'Jaws' the creature was a naturally occurring species in its own natural habitat - injecting an infusion of realism into the sub-genre.

Though he denied taking any direct inspiration, Benchley may have been influenced to write the novel by a series of five shark attacks in New Jersey in 1916, which resulted in four deaths. Spielberg, however, would cite this as inspiration when it came to the making of the movie, bloodying the waters as to how much influence these attacks had on the fiction. It should be noted that it was never definitively proven that a lone shark was responsible, nor the species of the attacker - a great white or a bull shark considered the most likely culprits.

Benchley is credited as co-writer of the screenplay for ‘Jaws’ along with Carl Gottlieb, writing several of the original drafts (Gottlieb is credited with lightening the tone of the screenplay by adding humour through his rewrites, while Spielberg wished to remove the adultery subplot and devised the more explosive finale, all perfect decisions for the story's translation to the screen). The resulting film became incredibly successful; garnering a cult following and credited with being the first summer blockbuster, it set the blueprint for natural horror films and remains an iconic and influential film fifty years later. Three sequels followed: 'Jaws 2' in 1978; 'Jaws 3-D' in 1983; and 'Jaws: The Revenge' in 1987.

Largely as a result of both the novel and films, the poor great white has earned an unfair reputation as a maneater. Though undoubtedly a dangerous predator and statistically responsible for the most attacks on humans of any shark species, these attacks are likely the result of mistaken identity or in response to perceived threat, with fatalities proving a rarity. Nevertheless, the enduring image of the terrifying underwater predator has endured in human imagination for half a century.

Dark and thrilling, ‘Jaws’ is an entertaining, character-driven aquatic action adventure, the template for a timeless story that we will revisit forevermore in our quest to not fall prey to nature’s most formidable predators.



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