28th August 2025
It is now 50 years since Steven Spielberg’s blockbuster Jaws took the cinematic world by storm, its combination of narrative conflicts, breath-taking shocks and special effects – aided by John Williams’s dramatically sinister score – relating how Amity Island in New England was being terrorised by a man-eating Great White shark. (Not just man-eating, but young woman-eating and little-boy-eating as well). This is an opportune time, therefore, to re-visit the original novel, written by Peter Benchley, which was published the previous year.
Familiarity with the screen-based adaptation makes it difficult to resist making comparisons between book and film. Not surprisingly, many parts of the storyline are common – from the shark’s initial assault on the unfortunate Chrissy Watkins through to its later destruction of the underwater metal viewing-cage belonging to Matt Hooper, the zoologist who specialises in fish life – “an ichthyologist, actually”, as he introduces himself on his arrival from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute.
The central character is Martin Brody, the Chief of Police, who, in the book, is a long-term resident of Amity, rather than a recent migrant from New York. (In contrast with the film, the novel’s Amity is a Long Island coastal resort). It is Brody who is faced with the story’s core dilemma: whether to close the beaches in the interests of public safety or bow to the pressures exerted by the local businesses, led by the mayor Larry Vaughan, to keep the resort open at the height of the tourist season on the assumption that the shark would (probably) have moved on to other waters. When he initially makes the wrong decision – resulting in the death of the young boy – he is faced with the desperate grief-stricken chastisement of the boy’s mother; I thought this worked better in the film, in which the confrontation takes place in the full gaze of the Amity public, rather than in Brody’s office.
Some of the film’s well-known scenes do not appear in the original. The shocked Brody’s famous line when he (and we) see the dead-eyed stare of Spielberg’s monster for the first time – “You’re gonna to need a bigger boat” – is absent, as is the terrifying account related later by the tough and embittered professional fisherman, Quint, of the fate in shark-infested waters of those several hundred sailors thrown into the sea when the USS Indianapolis was sunk by an Imperial Japanese Navy torpedo in July 1945.
But enough of the film. The novel has the advantage of being able to stretch the narrative out over time. We learn something of the contrasting backstories of Martin Brody and his wife, Ellen. We get a full understanding of how Amity’s year-round economy is totally dependent on the 12-week summer season. We also discover that Mayor Vaughan’s perspective is driven by long-standing financial obligations to his shady business “partners”, who turn out to have Mafia connections. On the downside, the pace of the story sags with another of its sub-plots: the short-lived affair between Hooper and the unhappy Ellen. Martin’s suspicions about this eat away at him in the second half of the book with the result that an initially uneasy collaboration between the local Chief and the visiting shark-expert turns into one of mutual loathing.
In some respects, the book reveals the period in which it is written. A conversation between Ellen and Hooper on their sexual fantasies develops into something really quite unpleasant. Likewise, whilst the few mentions of Amity’s (small) black population understandably focus on the low-skill work that the tourist season provides, the racial divisions of 1970s America can be detected below the surface. When Harry Meadows, the editor of Amity’s local newspaper, considers what the impact of a poor tourist season would be, his reference point is instructive: “[N]ext winter is going to be the worst in the history of this town. We’re going to have so many people on the dole that Amity will look like Harlem”. He chuckled. “Harlem-by-the-Sea”.
And so to the climax, which is also stretched over time. The final voyage of Brody, Hooper and Quint in their quest to find and kill the shark takes place over four separate days and this allows Benchley to build up the tension before the final thrilling confrontation between men and beast. I shall not reveal the outcome other than to say – breaking my earlier promise – that it is different to the film.
JR Alexander 