Our dramatic detour continues with a real KILLER story by Peter Tonkin plunging us into an icy ocean of Arctic terror! "As good as Jaws," says the Lewiston Journal, but I beg to differ because Tonkin's a far better writer than Peter Benchley, and his story is far more interesting than that famous bubblegum beach read. Benchley has since been very publicly remorseful of the shabby treatment he gave sharks in his breakout hit, and rightly so. Thankfully, Tonkin threads the needle for his subject much more successfully, and leaves no mistaken impressions of the mighty killer whale. First off, we have the simple fact that the orca, while a fearsome angel of death for seals, sea lions, and its larger cousins among Cetacea, has never been reliably documented hunting humans in the wild. Whereas Herzog and DeLaurentiis had to invent a mythical vengeance drive for their orca, Tonkin does them one better and puts the onus of his killer's bad attitude solely on humankind - specifically, a fictional extension to the very real and very disturbing "US Navy Marine Mammal Training Program" which trained dolphins in "anti-frogmen" techniques during Vietnam. Tonkin only has to stretch things a little bit to have the Navy attempting to train an awesome specimen of Orcinus orca in the same killer skillset, and he only needs a convenient jailbreak by this incredibly intelligent animal in order to kick off the action and put our cast of human characters in mortal peril. This small bit of dramatic license ends up giving us a much richer payoff than Benchley's unresearched, unnatural off-the-cuff writing: we already know how orcas react to the stresses of captivity, so imagine those dark impulses encouraged by a hubristic assassination program. We are the authors of our own misfortune.
And what of our human characters? A science team, stranded on an ice floe. Their guides, and only hope of survival: a giant of an Englishman and his Inuit soul brother, bound together as hard men gone through hard times. Digressions on Inuit mythology, a mythos grown from a spare, dangerous world of earth and air, blood and sky and the deep blue sea. Simple ingredients, just add one killer and shake them all together. Tonkin's naturalistic portrayal of danger brings to mind Alistair Maclean. Our killer may be trained in cetacean commando tactics, but he's hardly a Freddy or a Jason, unbound by time and space. Indeed, our survivors will find that the Arctic landscape can be even more treacherous than their hunter: there's a harrowing sequence mid-book where a panicked herd of walrus threaten to demolish the fragile ice floe. Hypothermia, frostbite, drowning, hungry polar bears, and one hungry, angry, homicidal orca ... but that's not all. Our killer has hooked up with a wild pod of orcas, and he's doing his damnedest to teach them some new tricks, to blood them in the same wretched business he's been forced into ... here is a perfect example of the thriller in action, the terror of implication, the second step to fear that we take ourselves, with only a gentle push from the author. A good writer like Tonkin can trust us to take that step, to throw ourselves into the abyss, even if there's a killer waiting in the blackness below.
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| An Italian edition |
Signet Books, 1979
Sounds pretty good!
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