Book details of 'White Shark'

Title	White Shark
Author(s)	Peter Benchley
ISBN	0312955731
Language	English
Published	August 1995
Publisher	St. Martin's Press

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The Virtual Bookcase Reviews of 'White Shark':

Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Peter Benchley can do *way* better than this. I mean, look at "Jaws," which everybody was reading on the beach that summer since they were afraid to go into the water because of possible shark attacks. Not, perhaps, the Great American Novel, but it had a rather astonishing sensitivity to good and evil for a modern work. Let's look at the technology, first. Actually, there are too many missing pieces in the technology, and biology, to say much for sure. That part of the story seems to be complicated and convoluted beyond all belief, and seems to indicate that Benchley changed his mind several times about things without bothering to go back and revise the narrative. (At one point it is quite clear that a certain process has been taught and practiced, while not too far away it is unequivocally stated that the procedure was never taught.) I suppose I don't have too much difficulty with the idea that cognition could be reduced to minimal levels while metabolism was slowed or suspended. However, the disparity between the phenomenal feats of strength and the lack of returning thought and memory seems excessive. Speaking of suspended, this is one of the uncertain areas of the book. The story seems to indicate that "Der Weisse Hai" is locked in a kind of pandora's box for fifty years, opened only by the foolish intervention of explorers. At the same time, there seems to be evidence that the thing could have exited at any time. Neither construction really makes much sense: a fifty year hibernation is clearly excessive, and a failure to escape is inconsistent with the later activities. Benchley also seems to be feeling a little guilty about his role in portraying sharks as monsters of the deep, and gives us a rather facile conservationist thread in this book. The big technical blowout (literally) comes in the climax of the book. I can quite believe that a rapid pressurization would cause excruciating pain in the ears. However, any diver knows that dissolving enough nitrogen in the tissues to create severe bends takes hours, not seconds. This is why divers have decompression tables. And explosive decompression just simply does not happen like that. The technical problems are not the only ones with the work. Many items in the book are introduced and then forgotten, giving the piece a ragged feel. As noted before, the author seems to have changed his mind on a number of issues and then seems to have felt that the reading public simply didn't deserve the courtesy of a little cleanup. One of the changes seems to have been the length of the book. The setup takes a long time, and a number of important characters are introduced way too late for a story of this size. Benchley appears to have intended to write a novel and then, half way through, decided that he was too bored and that a pulp paperback was good enough. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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