The Deep Peter Benchley (Andre Deutsch £3.25)
Two Much! DohaId E. Westlake (Hodder and Stoughton £3.75) What do morphine, explosives, voodoo, Sharks, moray eels, rape, murder, mutilation, Spanish treasure, forgery, smuggling, revolution, ciguatoxin, anoxia, honeymooners and true love all have in common ? he answer is a follow-up to Jaws, in this case Peter Benchley's own called The Deep. Clearly the man is desperate. He is riot inclined to let the world forget that there is a lot of money to be made out of the sea and the primal terror it embodies, but he is damned if he knows how to repeat his original success, perhaps because such things are in their nature unrepeatable. As he writes, one of his bulbous bloodshot eyes is crazily hooked on to the big screen. The fact that he repeats so many of Jaws' features is a measure of his uncertainty, although water is obviously his métier. Instead of the island of Martha's Vineyard in the north we have that of Bermuda in the south. Instead of deep-sea fishing we have eeP-sea diving. Instead of shark attacks we nave the threat of moray eels, and of human beings as well. Instead of the recluse sea dog who eventually co-operates we have the recluse sea diver, Romer Treece, the brute With the heart of gold and a fondness for Phrases like 'heavy shit'. And again the tension created by naive innocence caught
the hop by a hidden horror is worked to death, over and over.
_Two honeymooners plop into the water °R Bermuda and uncover a submerged fortune in morphine ampoules, wrecked cltiring the war. The local aggro merchant, a black voodoo demagogue, who stops at nothing and frequently distributes mangled piIS to underline the point, wants the °rtune to finance his overthrow of British rlu e, The honeymooners seek Romer's help V,Vd while the three of them are digging up on the sea bed, surrounded by tuhnexPloded shells which also went down at e time, they discover a second wreck underneath the first, containing jewels Nv,hich the King of Spain had wanted to r,,glve to the Duchess of Parma hundreds of ars ago. What follows will already be farMiliar to those of you who took time off F2in Monopoly on rainy holidays to read amous Fives and Secret Sevens. tr Since Mr Benchley is himself a keen casure fancier, he has the know-how to „,a4zle his readers with occult knowledge. ..rle reached to the transom and uncleated fterie stern line, letting the stern swing a few et a'A'ay from the dock, then recleated the
line'. Enid Blyton may have lacked this kind of specialist vocabulary in nautical matters but she often said much the same thing, particularly about school uniforms. Mr Benchley's handling of undersea paranoia could be Enid describing the resolution of a game of Patience on one of those wet afternoons.' . . . a ruptured lung, a pocket of air in the chest cavity collapsing the lung, forcing still more air into the chest cavity, that air ramming the collapsed lung and other organs across the chest cavity and collapsing the other lung. Bilateral spontaneous pneumothorax'. Heavy shit, certainly.
It seems to be Mr Benchley's God-given purpose to drive people out of the sea at all costs, but if Jaws bankrupted resorts all down America's east coast, the economy of Bermuda looks more or less safe from The Deep. The direct adventurous drive of the first book is replaced by over-calculated hand-me-down effects in the second. If your name is Jules Verne or Herman Melville, you have nothing to fear. Donald E. Westlake's Two Much! is at the other end of the USA pulp market: fun-so-help-me-God. It is Mr Westlake's nineteenth knockabout, a sex farce about a man who marries a pair of twins by pretending to be his brother half the time. Between visits to the bottle I spent an evening trying to track down the joke and it was only when I came to the very last line in the book that I discovered .what it was: 'Was that supposed to be funny ? I threw it away.'
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