(In January 2025 I was asked by Rapport newspaper to tell them about a book I read that had an effect on me. This piece, written for ease of translation, was first published in Afrikaans.)
In 1979, when I was eight years old, my family spent our Christmas holiday on my aunt and uncle’s farm in what was then called Zimbabwe-Rhodesia. It was a dangerous time, but I felt safe. When the men came in from the fields to eat breakfast they left their rifles neatly in a row on the ground outside the front door. They sat at the table and spread marmalade on toast and discussed the tobacco crop, and whether it would rain, and family gossip. They saved talk about politics for low voices in the lounge in the evenings after the children had been sent to bed.
On a bookshelf in the guest room was a paperback novel with a short title on the spine, printed in red, that didn’t appeal to me. Jaws? What’s that, a story about dentists? But one idle afternoon I took the book from the shelf and on the cover were two things that turned my world inside out: a naked woman swimming in the night-time sea, and a gigantic shark, its mouth a cluttered cutlery drawer of carving knives, rising from the deep to meet her.
I can still recite by heart the first line: “The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.” I wasn’t 100% sure what “crescent” meant, but I thought I’d be able to work it out.
In fact there were many things in the book that I would have to work out: swearwords; more swearwords; the mysteries of anatomy; the secrets and compulsions and betrayals of sex and adult behaviour. Steven Spielberg’s movie of Jaws had none of that, but Peter Benchley’s novel is at least as much a portrait of police chief Martin Brody’s failing marriage as it is a story about a shark that eats people. In the book Brody’s wife Ellen decides to have an affair with Matt Hooper, the marine biologist, and in the years to come I studied the scenes of their guilty afternoon tryst so closely, and reread them so many times, trying to figure out exactly what they were doing, that today they’re as much a part of my life experience as if they’d happened to me.
My Aunt Rose asked my mother in a low voice, “Isn’t that book a little adult for him?” But children have never since been as free or as fortunate as we were in the 1970s. “I’m sure it’s fine,” said my mother vaguely. “It keeps him quiet.”
It did that, and it also slightly ruined my holiday: in the hot afternoons after lunch, when a drowsy heavy silence settled over the farm, I would walk barefoot with my towel to the swimming pool on the other side of the giant pepper tree. Once I started reading Jaws, I could still just about get into the shallow end, but I became more and more worried about the deep end, where the water was the kind of bottomless inky blue-black that might lead to an underwater cave, connected to the sea by a subterranean tunnel thousands of kilometers long, the kind of tunnel into which a shark might swim …
I’d start swimming with a kind of tentative doggy paddle, breathing slowly, keeping calm, but as I moved deeper a sudden panic would seize me and I’d thrash my way to the side of the pool and throw myself out of the water and onto the hot slasto, gasping and wheezing like a skinny white seal.
Of course, I knew there was no tunnel that ran from the deep end of my aunt and uncle’s swimming pool to the sea, and of course I knew that a freshwater pool on a farm in a landlocked country was an unlikely place to encounter a great white shark, but I was learning the very important lesson that what you know is far less important than what you can imagine. Even now, a grown man sitting at a desk far from that swimming pool, more than forty years later, I can stare into space and remember that summer and I can smell the chlorine of the pool and the paper of the pages and my heart starts racing and I know that there is no bottom to the deep end, and if I go over there, something will rise toward me from the darkness, something that has come a long way to find me.
That was the last summer we spent on my aunt and uncle’s farm. The farm was a dangerous place, for reasons that had nothing to do with sharks. When we left to go home at the end of December, I took Jaws with me, hidden at the bottom of my suitcase. For most of my childhood after that I was obsessed with sharks, or maybe infatuated. I wanted to become a marine biologist when I left school, like Matt Hooper, even though he was eaten in the end. Whenever I saw the sea – which, living in Durban, happened quite a lot – I would stare out across its glittering, impenetrable surface, lost in wondering what might be underneath.
Later in life I spent a lot of time swimming and diving with sharks, including great whites. When you encounter a great white shark underwater, without a cage, there is a powerful feeling of your smallness before the annihilating immensity of the world, that sense of terror and beauty that the philosopher Edmund Burke called the Sublime. But still, even in those moments I never experienced quite the same fear and awe that I felt reading the book, that hot summer in 1979. I never again experienced the same transgression, the same danger, the same wordless delight of discovering that the world is so much wider and deeper than we can see, that there is volume underneath us and all around, filled with wonders and monsters. It turns out it wasn’t actually the shark that excited me, it was what happened when I read about it. I never became a marine biologist.
To this day, whenever I open a new book I’m hoping for that experience again, sexy and dangerous, a glimpse of something bigger and more adult than I could previously have imagined. I have several editions of Jaws today but I don’t think I’ll ever re-read it. I’m afraid to discover that it no longer has the power to evoke that feeling, or that I’m no longer capable of feeling it. I still have the original paperback copy that I stole at the end of the summer of 1979. I took it from the shelf this morning and opened it at random. It fell open to one of the sex scenes, of course. Ellen Brody is musing about her life: “The past always seems better when you look back on it than it did at the time. And the present never looks as good as it will in the future.”
Then she has sex with Matt Hooper, and later he gets eaten by a shark.
