On a late-summer day in 2001, at the University of Poitiers in west-central France, the palaeontologist Michel Brunet summoned his colleagues into a classroom to examine an unusual skull. Brunet had just returned from Chad, and brought with him an extremely ancient cranium. It had been distorted by the aeons spent beneath what is now the Djurab desert; a crust of black mineral deposits left it looking charred and slightly malevolent. It sat on a table. “What is this thing?” Brunet wondered aloud. He was behaving a bit theatrically, the professor Roberto Macchiarelli recalled not long ago. Brunet was a devoted teacher and scientist, then 61, but his competitive impulses were also known to be immoderate, and he seemed to take a ruthless pleasure in the jealousy of his peers. “Michel is a dominant male,” Macchiarelli told me. “He’s a silverback gorilla.”
Inspecting the skull, one could make out a mosaic of features at once distinctly apelike and distinctly human: a small braincase and prominent brow ridge, but also what seemed to be a rather unprotruding jaw, smallish canines and a foramen magnum – the hole at the base of the skull through which the spinal cord connects to the brain – that suggested the possibility of an upright bearing, a two-legged gait. Macchiarelli told Brunet he did not know what to make of it. “Right answer!” Brunet said.
Yet, at 50 years old, Jaws is also a celebration of sharks, creating a fascination that helped lead to more than two generations of new shark researchers. Indeed, some of the people who have done the most for shark conservation worked on Jaws.
It is indulgence without punishment, goodness without suffering.
This is a novel that wants to be everything; it’s stuffed to the gills not just with corpses but with language, with games, with gorgeous costumes and period details. The effect is overwhelming. But as Schmitz and the Dadaists and a thousand cabaret artists know, aesthetic derangement is a fit response – perhaps the only appropriate response – to a senseless and cruel world ferrying itself towards destruction.
What lifts it beyond routine reminiscence (and makes the excess of cigarette cards and Airfix kits more bearable) is its evocation of a lost era, a postwar culture eager to embrace new freedoms while still recovering from the privations of the 1930s and 40s.