Meg: Primal Waters by Steve Alten





I spend a lot of time watching bad movies. When not doing that I can read bad movies too, as is the case with Steve Alten’s newest giant shark book, Meg: Primal Waters.

If you haven’t read the previous two Meg books you’ve really missed out. In the first book, Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror, it was revealed that Carcharadon Megalodon, a 60 foot long ancestor of the great white shark, survived extinction by adapting to living at the bottom of the Mariana Trench in the Pacific ocean. Some kind of temperature condition kept them down there, but a fluke accident allowed one to escape, and paleobiologist Jonas Taylor had to battle the creature as it hunted off the coast of California. Jonas… Jonas… Do you think he gets swallowed by the shark at one point? Nah, no writer would be so obvious.

The whole scenario was pretty ridiculous, and poor writing made it worse. Once on the surface a Meg subsists entirely on a diet of broad stereotypes. The good people are all really good, and the bad people are completely bad. It’s the kind of book where if someone is mean, or even rude, to one of the main characters you know that person will be shark scat by the end of the book. A giant prehistoric shark is a neat idea, however, and Hollywood snapped the book up for adaptation. No movie has yet been made, possibly because of the book’s climax, where Jonas is swallowed by the shark (shock!) and cuts his way through the animal’s guts to stop its heart with his bare hands. Allegedly Patrick Stewart was going to play Jonas, and I’d pay double to see him crawl through shark innards… but let’s face it, it’s not going to happen. In any case, the delay has allowed several low budget giant shark movies to come out, including Shark Attack 3: Megalodon (2002) and Shark Hunter (2001).

Alten followed up Meg with The Trench, which actually managed to up the goofiness level. One Meg had been captured and put on display, but in this book it escapes. Meanwhile Jonas’ wife Terry (or maybe she would marry him later, I forget) was kidnapped by a billionaire and kept against her will in a habitat at the bottom of the Mariana Trench. Oh, and it turns out that there are Kronosaurs down there, giant aquatic reptiles from the time of the dinosaurs. How do they breathe at the bottom of the ocean? Why, these Kronosaurs have evolved gills. Oh, that makes se… WHAT???

Meg: Primal Waters takes place 18 years after the events of The Trench, so now Jonas and Terry have a teenaged daughter, Dani, and son, David. The odd thing is that are very few indications that the book is taking place in 2020. There are no references to advanced technology, the pop culture is exactly like today’s… In fact the only thing speculative about the whole novel is a chapter that takes place at Giants Field where Pat Burrell of the Phillies overtakes Barry Bonds as the all time homerun champion.

Things haven’t been going well for Jonas since the Meg escaped the artificial lagoon he ran, so he agrees to act as a color commentator on the second season of a reality stunt show called Daredevils. Daredevils is one of those reality shows that only exist in bad fiction, where the producers of the show don’t have any idea what’s going to happen next, and often don’t have any way to film it if it does happen. Two teams of extreme sporting youngster try to outdo each other with outrageous stunts, and this season is based on a sailing ship at sea which is supposed to explain Jonas’ participation. Dani goes along with Jonas because she thinks one of the Daredevils is cute. What Jonas doesn’t know is that it’s all a set up and a Meg is following the ship.

Terry heads to Canada because that country is worried that a Meg is feeding in their waters and causing whales to beach. They’re right, of course, but they don’t want to tell anybody because they Don’t Want to Close the Beaches. Terry arranges to catch the shark so the lagoon will have a new attraction.

And back in San Diego David has found out that Angel, the Meg that escaped the lagoon 18 years ago, has visited the lagoon recently. All he has to do is find a way to close the poorly maintained seawall doors and lure her back and he can recapture Angel easily. He enlists the aid of Jonas’ former partner Mac, and together they come up with a plan. What they don’t do is tell anyone that Angel is back in waters heavily populated by humans, and it isn’t too long before there’s a massacre. They somehow manage to ignore that their willful silence results in a dozen or so deaths.

So there’s been 18 years where no one has seen a Meg, but now three members of the species show up at the same time, and all three end up in the close vicinity of a Taylor. Victor Hugo would look at this plot and say, “There are too many coincidences for my taste.” Also, I’m not exactly sure why that temperature thing is no longer an issue for the Megs. Shouldn’t the Megs be out in force if they can leave the relatively sparsely populated trench?

The meat of the plot is what happens to Jonas, so let me elaborate on that some more. As it develops Jonas was really chosen to go on the Daredevil ship by Maren, a paleobiologist who hates Jonas. Maren feels that Jonas besmirched the reputation of paleobiologists by becoming a celebrity, and so he has used a drone he’s designed to train a Meg to go where he wants via electronic signals. He plans to have the Meg attack the Daredevils and kill Jonas in the process. The producers go along with this because of the ratings, and Maren is counting on the resulting footage of the Meg to make him a celebrity... huh. Maren also has a Sumo wrestler as his chief thug. As Wayland Smithers would say, he just crossed over that line from everyday villainry to cartoonish super villainy.

The climax of Meg: A Novel of Deep Terror would be pretty hard to beat for sheer silliness, but credit where credit is due, Alten tries to outdo himself in Primal Waters. As Maren hovers over some survivors of the Meg attacks in a helicopter, Jonas grabs the 42 lb. drone Maren uses to control the shark and steers it towards the helicopter. Then Jonas rides the drone, and somehow makes it jump in the air high enough that the 63 year old Jonas grabs the landing skid of the helicopter AND holds on to the drone. When Maren opens the helicopter door to see what the noise is, Jonas throws the drone into the helicopter, and a few moments later the Meg jumps out of the water and grabs the helicopter, dragging it into the water. Anybody wanting to know how the Meg could keep following the signal even after the drone was out of the water should direct enquiries to Steve Alten c/o stevealten.com.

There's a lot more I could complain about, but I want to get to sleep sometime in the next 24 hours. Let me just finish by saying that the whole book is written in a weird present tense that makes the novel read like a movie being narrated for the visually impaired ("Masao nods uncomfortably. 'I assume you received the letter from my attorney.' Drew looks away, gazing at the lagoon."), and that the title is actually a tease for the proposed fourth novel in the series. Yes, the "primal waters" aren't in this book, but were actually discovered by Maren. Apparently there are trenches off the Philippines that contain all sorts of prehistoric life forms, and now that Maren's dead Jonas intends on taking credit for that discovery himself. More specifically, the fourth novel would be about David being trapped in one of those trenches and menaced by a Liopleurodon (a 75 foot long reptile... with gills again, no doubt), and Jonas training Angel to retrieve objects so he can mount a rescue mission. In other words, expect more badly written shark silliness.

Posted: Sun - September 19, 2004 at      

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