Authors, they say, can spend more time crafting the opening of a novel than all the remaining pages put together. As Peter Benchley's editor at Doubleday tells it, the "first five pages [of the original manuscript] were just wonderful. They just went into the eventual book without any changes." When the book was published a number of critics cited the first chapter as a hook that no reader could wriggle free from. Book World said, "To read the first few pages of Peter Benchley's book is to be compelled to read them all...". Newsday said, "From the opening chapter when a young woman plunges into the surf and meets the twenty foot shark, the reader is hooked." The Chicago Sun-Times claimed the book was "pure engrossment from the very opening."
The first sentence of Jaws ("The great fish moved silently through the night water, propelled by short sweeps of its crescent tail.") is curious in the fact that it avoids the use of the word 'shark'. Indeed, Benchley eschews the word entirely until the third chapter, and throughout the book tends to prefer the lesser charged 'fish'. The opening paragraph reads like a page from National Geographic and fills us in on on the workings of the fish's respiratory system and hardly qualifies as an attention-grabber.
The second paragraph is an early example of both bad writing and bad editing. We are told that "The land seemed almost as dark as the water, for there was no moon." Then in the very next sentence: "All that separated sea from shore was a long straight stretch of beach - so white that it shone." Interestingly, there is a similar confusion of illumination in the opening of the movie, with both a full moon and a setting sun providing alternate light sources.
The first two human characters - a man and a woman - appear in the third paragraph and make love "with urgent ardor on the cold sand". Benchley employs the language of the bodice-ripper and discretely inserts an adverb to move the story on ("Afterward, the man lay back and closed his eyes.").
The woman - who remains nameless until the end of the chapter - goes into the water. Benchley dedicates a full paragraph to her wading in, and already in this description she is being reduced to her constituent body parts ("... a small wave crashed into her knees ... the water was only up to her hips ... she continued walking until the water covered her shoulders..."). When she eventually starts swimming it is with "the jerky, head-above-water stroke of the untutored." On the film's poster, the naked girl's delicately cocked wrist suggests a certain gracefulness in her crawl.
With both prey and predator in the water, the paragraphs alternate between their points of view. We are given more National Geographic detail ("Running within the length of its body were a series of thin canals, filled with mucus and dotted with nerve endings...") and there is one striking image (the tiny phosphorescent animals in the water "casting a mantle of sparks over the fish."), which may be invoking the phrase "like a phosphorescent shark in a midnight sea" from Herman Melville's Redburn.
Benchley plays up the suspense before the attack. The woman is lifted by a small wave as the fish hurtles past her and she briefly pauses, unsure of its cause. The shark assumes the standard attack formation ("The fish began to circle close to the surface. Its dorsal fin broke water, and its tail, thrashing back and forth, cut the glassy surface with a hiss.") and the tension derives from the fact that the woman is unaware of the danger she is in.
The attack is described in three graphic paragraphs. The woman's initial reaction to having her right leg severed below the knee is probably not medically accurate - she feels a tug on her leg but registers no pain until her hand groping beneath the water makes contact with "a nub of bone and tattered flesh" - but by delaying her "guttural cry of terror" for a few gory sentences, it manages to pile on the horror.
In the next paragraph the shark moves in for the kill. It attacks in a frenzy of violent verbs (hurtle, strike, knock, snap, crunch and smash), and, not for the last time, Benchley likens it to "a locomotive".The word 'jaws' is used twice within three sentences.
The final paragraph describes the shark feeding on its prey - now, no longer a woman in the text, but "the corpse" - and it closes as the body parts drift as flotsam towards the beach, where they will be discovered in the second chapter.
The remainder of the first chapter describes the man's search for the missing woman. It has its share of clunky Dan Brown-like prose ("The man stood and began to dress. He was annoyed that the woman had not woken him when she went back to the house, and he found it curious that she had left her clothes on the beach.") and seems unnecessarily protracted. At the bottom of page seven (all page numbers are for the Fawcett paperback edition) we learn that the woman was called Chrissie. There is also a suggestion that the other house guests (the Henkels) are into swinging, a lifestyle that helped to define the Seventies.
The chapter ends with the kind of line you never hear in real life ("I don't know what time the police in this town go to work, but I guess this is as good a time as any to find out."), but in fiction acts as a convenient segue into the next scene.
