Thursday, May 29, 2014

Free Willy's Killer Instincts

Orca
by Arthur Herzog
p. 1977









I knew I was getting myself into trouble when, two pages into Arthur Herzog’s Orca I encountered this line, about its main protagonist:


“Jack occasionally wondered—though not for long—what his sister was like in bed.”


Hm. Okay.


Though, to be fair, ‘trouble’ is what I was expecting when I decided to read a book with a giant killer whale on the front cover obliterating bay area housing structures while a flaxen-haired Adonis accosts it with a javelin.


(None of that happened in the book, by the way.)


I would feel bad for Arthur Herzog that his novel was so grossly misrepresented by ambitious cover art drawn by someone who clearly hasn’t read his book... but an epic battle between man and beast is far more easily depicted than the barely-concealed incestuous undertones actually found in this novel.


So, Orca is a book about this dick who gets menaced by a killer whale for a few days off the coast of Newfoundland. Jack Campbell and his crew, including his airhead blonde bombshell sister, her dopey hippie boyfriend, and a wizened old salt who is like a father figure to Jack (so, like, you know he’s toast...) set out from Florida to catch a shark for some Japanese equivalent of Sea World, but decide to nab themselves an orca instead after the alpha male kills the shark they are hunting. In their attempt to ensnare a live orca, they totally fuck it up and kill the alpha’s mate and the baby she is in the process of calving.


The orca proceeds to stalk Jack—about as well as a sea creature can stalk someone on land—which is to say it just sort of swims around all threateningly and destroys a few boats in the harbor. For contrived reasons, Jack apparently can’t just... drive home... on land... where the whale can’t get him... and hangs around like the dick he is, not caring that he is totally mucking things up for everybody. So the Canadians decide to go all Children of the Corn on Jack and basically sacrifice him to the whale by sending him out to confront the enraged animal, which is sort of rude and so un-Canadian.


At some point in the novel, the orca bites Jack’s sister’s leg off, which should be an indication that he should cut his losses and take the bus or something, but instead, Jack gets all obsessive and decides he must kill the whale himself. It’s not so much a poor man’s Moby Dick as it is a stupid person’s Moby Dick.


Intertwined with this idiotic tale of revenge is an even more idiotic love story between Jack and a professor of zoology, Rachel Bedford. Rachel is in town to study the whales and even though the first few times she meets Jack he is calling her a "stupid bitch" and generally being a crude mysoginistic asshole, they eventually end up sleeping together because apparently Rachel is into crude, mysoginist assholes. I lost track of the number of times Herzog offended me with the way he depicted his female characters, but here is a nice snippet:


She smiled warmly. “Maybe we’d better stay with our problem for now. What I should be telling you is... hop on the first bus and get out of here. But I’m not. Know why?”

“Why?”

“Because this is the most interesting experiment I’ve ever encountered—man against super-whale.”

“Cold-blooded bitch,” he said, half-joking.

“Also, I’m terrified. Kiss me, darling.”



But women aren’t just dumb and scared in Herzog’s story. They’re also entirely incapable of thinking for themselves. Rachel initially opposes Jack’s vendetta against the creature she has come to respect through her studies, even going to far as to join his final voyage with the intent to sabotage his efforts to ‘slay the beast’ but it takes about five minutes for her to change her whimsical female brain and decide she was in fact for killing the whale. No reason. Just ‘cause she finally realized that Jack must be right all along, and she just didn’t get it. The piece of dialogue that actually made me laugh out loud, though, read as follows:



“Rachel, let’s go to bed.”

“I don’t know if I can get my mind off that whale,” she said hesitantly.

“Try.”

“Okay.”


Wow. Bravo, Arthur Herzog. Clearly you are an orca among the sharks when it comes to clever crafting of phrases. I bow to your superior wordsmanship.


But I digress.


I’d say overall my experience with Herzog’s Orca was a satisfying one, because it delivered exactly what I thought I was getting into—a quick read, a fair bit of head-shaking, and the literary equivalent of a summertime creature-killer flick. Incidentally, this book was immediately made into a creature-killer flick, but coming out on the heels of Jaws, Orca, sadly, faded into 70's horror flick oblivion. The orcas may have won the battle but the sharks won the war.

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