Product Description

It was just another day in the life of a small Atlantic resort until the terror from the deep came to prey on unwary holiday makers. The first sign of trouble - a warning of what was to come - took the form of a young woman's body, or what was left of it, washed, up on the long, white stretch of beach...A summer of terror has begun. 'Pick up Jaws before midnight, read the first five pages, and I guarantee you'll be putting it down breathless and stunned, as dawn is breaking the next day' Daily Express; Peter Benchley's Jaws first appeared in 1974, creating a legend that refuses to die. For a new generation, the ultimate holiday nightmare is about to begin all over again...

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21481 in Books
• Published on: 2004-10-15
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

About the Author
Peter Benchley was born in New York City in 1940 and is the son of novelist Nathaniel Benchley and grandson of humorist Robert Benchley. He has worked as a reporter for the Washington Post, as associate editor of Newsweek and as a speech-writer for President Johnson. His stories and articles have appeared in numerous magazines, including the New Yorker and National Geographic. Jaws is his first novel.

Customer Reviews

Yeah, unemployment and adultery suck. But what about the shark?
It's difficult to read a novel like Jaws without thinking of the film it inspired. It's not a bad book of course, and I'd say it deserved its bestseller status. It's exciting, the monstrous shark is well-realised, and Peter Benchley goes to great pains to examine the effect it has on the small town of Amity. But that's exactly the issue. The shark is just a catalyst for a lot of problems in Amity: problems that each get their own rather futile sub-plots. The book's focus should be on the battle between man and shark. Instead there's unemployment, class struggles, midlife crises, disintegrating marriages and - in one particularly unlikely and annoying diversion - Mafia involvement. The film chucked all of this, of course, and like The Godfather and Blade Runner (which also abandoned the less useful subplots from their source novels), it's better for it.

Much of the praise concerning the book seems to mention the first five pages, i.e. the famous opening shark attack. It is indeed an exciting start, but Benchley tries not to demonise the creature from the moment we meet it. He refers to it constantly as "the fish" - hardly a threatening term - and the attacks happen from its neutral perspective. It's the human characters who attribute intelligence and evil to the beast, while Benchley writes it as a calmly methodical eating machine. Again, the shark is just a catalyst: not actually an evil being, but destructive enough to bring out the worst in the people of Amity. The Mayor's mob ties are exposed; the town's parasitic dependence on tourism is laid bare, as Amity dies; and Chief Brody's marriage starts to buckle, as the stress of dealing with the shark lands squarely on him. It's not as if any of this is boring to read, thanks to Benchley's consistent, almost pulpy writing style. But it all feels beside the point.

Take Ellen Brody, for instance. The wife of our hero, Chief Martin Brody, she's panicking about her receding youth and the social status she no longer enjoys with her choice of husband. She meets icthyologist Matt Hooper, sent to investigate the shark, and recognises him as the younger brother of an ex-boyfriend. She throws a party - in reality a thin excuse to flirt with Hooper - later meets the younger man for lunch, and they sleep together in a hotel room. (Benchley skips the blessed event itself, but then pointlessly recounts it in flashback.) Ellen's mind never touches on the shark, and so my mind wandered. Her various sexual fantasies - which again, couldn't be further from the point - include such charmingly uncomfortable scenarios as prostitution and rape. I spent the whole scene waiting for Hooper to politely turn her down, or at least question what they're doing, which he didn't. After the lovers' shallow tryst, they don't see or speak to each other again. It's done simply to create some tension between Brody and Hooper when they're stuck on the boat together at the end. Why bother? As well as making Ellen and Hooper deeply unsympathetic (especially Hooper, whose casual attitude to maybe wrecking Brody's marriage doesn't tally), Brody's subsequent suspicions don't make him out to be particularly nice either. Steven Spielberg said he didn't find the characters all that likeable, and wanted the shark to win. I see what he means. (It almost goes without saying that Quint, who occasionally kills endangered dolphins and brags about it to Hooper, is also less than pleasant.)

The ending is another area where the film did it better. When our heroes - Brody, Hooper and shark-hunter Quint - go out to sea and don't immediately find the beast, they return home. After the second night, they do so again. The tension never quite builds as it does in the film, where they stayed at sea until the job was done. The antagonism between them - particularly Hooper and Quint, which there was more of in the film - would have ballooned more nerve-wrackingly had this been different. And when one character meets his end, rather sooner than he did in the film, it seems simply pointless and unsurprising. After being told that his plan is a stupid idea, it then turns out to be a stupid idea. Big surprise.

Also, of course, the shark's actual demise is muddled and anticlimactic. After nearly three hundred pages, the reader deserves a little more closure than the nightmarish shark simply dying of exhaustion. As Brody paddled home, I felt sure that couldn't be it. But with nothing awaiting him back on land besides a dead town with no mayor, and a wife who's got some explaining to do, perhaps it was the only good place to end.

It's unfair to judge the book on the film, so if you haven't seen the film, maybe read this first. Sadly I can't escape the bias: I prefer Spielberg's leaner, more exciting and much more quotable story to this one. It introduced such things as Brody's fear of water and, crucially, Hooper's sense of humour, and kept all the essential stuff about Amity's Mayor being wilfully blind about the threat of the shark. As is often the way with movies, it's the bare-bones version of what Benchley created, and the story shines a bit brighter without all the clutter. This is often thrilling stuff anyway, but it shrivels in comparison.

A classic novel of terror and suspense.
Peter Benchley's classic novel Jaws is definetly one of the most gripping novels that I have read in a long time. You all know the score with this book, we've all seen the film, but the novel really does build on the characterisation well. The novel is extremly well written throughout, with the classic heart stopping moments described in vivid detail. There are slight differneces between the book compared with the film, especially with the ending (but I won't ruin it for you). Benchley has really managed to create an atmosphere of isolation and shear terror within the pages of the book. I'd say that it is a novel that most people will find it hard to put down. This is the sort of book people will be reading from generation to generation. A classic novel of terror and suspense.

Gripping and ripping.
An old coverless copy of Jaws was left in my waiting room at the clinic. You can imagine my surprise when far from being a dental thriller, this book turned out to be all about a shark. Well I couldn't put the book down. As I read on my denture patients were suffering from floating lower chompers and food getting trapped underneath their falsies. So be it, this is a fabulous ripping tale, taut and explosive at the same time, has only one draw back - it caused a universal fear, hatred and subsequently slaughter of the Great White. I understand Mr Benchley is now on a crusade to rectify this. If successful that will be his greatest work.