Peter Benchley’s Jaws published in 1974 was a massive bestseller, and the Steven Spielberg film version invented the summer blockbuster. Over fifty years later I thought I’d have a look.

I found a story that was a kind of morality tale with no specific moral – an amorality tale if you will.

The shark is the ultimate bad guy of the piece, arriving off the beach of the American resort town of Amity and causing mayhem. An uneasy team gets together to fight the beast, Amity police chief Martin Brody, oceanographer Matt Hooper, and Quint, a local sports fisherman.

As a character the shark is amoral, Hooper explaining that the animal is simply acting instinctively in attacking people. But ideas of morality swirl around the human reaction. Is it immoral to keep the beaches open so that the tourist town of Amity can survive? Should they be closed to protect people from possible shark attack? And while Hooper the scientist, is rational, he can appear cooly unprincipled in his detachment. Look, for example, at how he behaves when Brody’s wife makes a pass at him. Let’s just say he acts on instinct, and doesn’t trouble himself too much with scruples. And Quint, the shark hunting fisherman – a cynical figure who insists on double pay for shark duty, with no care for bathers eaten if the stretched Amity police department can’t meet his demands – hardly a heroic St George saving the kingdom from a dragon.

And then there’s the final section where Quint, Brody and Hooper are hunting the shark. On each side of him, in the characters of his two companions, Brody seems to face a different kind of amorality – Hooper’s scientific detachment, and Quint’s brutish, animal cruelty. Brody has to somehow cobble together a sense of decency in the middle.

Admittedly I did find the writing in Jaws clunky, particularly in its awkward point of view shifts. And the final battle with the shark loses momentum when our heroes take a night off in the middle of the action – which of course didn’t happen in the film. Even so, this remained an interesting and thoughtful read, especially if you think of it as a modern fairytale, where sharks take the place of dragons.