back

MEG: A NOVEL OF DEEP TERROR
by Steve Alten
(Doubleday, 278 pages, hc, $22.95, 1997)

Something's deep here, all right, but it sure isn't the terror. Maybe it's the outrage of discerning readers suckered by Doubleday's half-million-dollar hype budget for this con job.

Perhaps it's time we institute what I'll call Benchley's Theorem: The quality of the novel is inversely proportional to the size of its fish. The original Jaws was a mediocre potboiler about a 20-foot shark that benefited immeasurably from being made into a superior film. With Meg - whose title more handily suggests a teenage babysitter - the shark is all of 60 feet, and even if Orson Welles rose from the dead to helm next summer's movie, it couldn't salvage the reputation of this steaming heap of poo.

My original plan was to compare Meg with the other prehistoric shark novel out now. But halfway there, I'm making a blind guess: If you must read one giant shark novel this summer, go for Charles Wilson's Extinct. It couldn't possibly be worse.

How bad is Meg? It may hold the distinction of being the first novel ever to inspire the author of a nonfiction work cited as a research source to profess public shame for the use to which his book was put, as happened in the July 20th L.A. Times Book Review.

In the role of the Guy Nobody Believes, Alten plugs in Jonas Taylor, a deep-sea submersible pilot turned paleontologist, who, years ago, saw a megalodon in the Mariana Trench while on a secret mission for the Navy. And you can pretty much guess the rest of the novel: Vindication. Rampage. Confrontation. Sushi.

Along the way, Alten's sins are flagrant. "A tremendous amount of research went into the making of this novel in order to maintain a high degree of realism," he boasts at the end. Yet he repeals the physical law of convection to pour a layer of warm water at the deepest levels of the Pacific, where his megs survived extinction. He tells us that six miles of freezing water protect us from them, yet in his ludicrous method of getting one topside, he would have us believe that enough hot blood can gush from a 45-foot shark to safely cocoon a 60-footer through that same six miles.

In place of characters, Alten substitutes caricatures for whom it's impossible to feel anything but contempt, mainly because they behave with the intelligence of brine shrimp. My favorites were the rad dudes who continue surfing through a slick of blood and whale blubber that's clearly drawing normal sharks. You want them to die, to improve the gene pool. Recurring characters fair no better. Jonas' hellspawn TV journalist wife wants to publicly discredit him but avoid any taint of personal scandal . so she hires another reporter to harass him. The alleged professionals of a shipboard tech crew ridicule Jonas during the middle of a submersible dive, even though they presumably realize that the slightest distraction or error could be fatal.

Alten's failures with science and psychology are compounded by prose so puerile it would embarrass an eighth-grader. And he loves exclamation points! That's how we know when things get really dramatic! You may find it annoying! The tool of a hack in over his head! One who employs more sound effects than a Superman comic! "BOOM! WHUMPPP! WHAMMM! WHOOSH! WHACK! CRAAAACK!"

At least Alten has a gift for unintended comedy, as in this inspired passage: "[T]his was no longer a game, people were being slaughtered! A common thought passed through the group: remaining in the water meant they also could be eaten!"

Perhaps the same fate befell Alten's editors while this travesty was in production. They certainly weren't around to clear up all the incomprehensibilities: A sinking ship that refuses to sink. The varying weight of the shark. Alten's cluelessness of the difference between "nauseous" and "nauseated." Ad nauseum. Here's hoping all their careers are doomed to swift extinction.

Back to Benchley's Theorem: "The quality of the novel is inversely proportional to the size of its fish." Based on Meg, there must be a whopping tale still to be told about a guppy.