Emperors of the Deep by William McKeever, review: do sharks deserve their bad reputation?
On an average year, sharks kill four humans and humans kill 100 million sharks. This feels shocking but it really shouldn’t – humanity’s habit of wreaking catastrophic damage on the oceans is not exactly a well-kept secret.
Blame Steven Spielberg. Jaws did such a good job of turning sharks into man-munching villains in the popular imagination that the reality has swum quietly below the surface, largely unnoticed. Just ask Peter Benchley, author of the 1974 novel on which the film was based, who was so filled with remorse after seeing the corpses of finned sharks littering the ocean floor while diving off the coast of Costa Rica that he became a lifelong campaigner for their conservation.
It is clear that sharks are in desperate need of a better PR outfit. Instead, they got William McKeever. A financial journalist-turned-environmental campaigner, he attempts to inspire affection for the ocean’s toothier inhabitants in a heartfelt but clumsy polemic, Emperors of the Deep. His passionate enthusiasm for his subject crashes wavelike on every page (and the book runs to a blubbery 270 of them). Unfortunately, so does his prose.
The best books of this kind take firm root in scientific research and then blossom into poetry (Jennifer Ackerman’s brilliant latest work The Bird Way is one such example) But McKeever is neither scientist nor poet; he’s an enthusiast, which, while making him valuable to the conservation effort, does not qualify him to write on its behalf. For a study of sharks, Emperors of the Deep is disappointingly toothless.
Through chapters whose themes range, a little tipsily, from individual species to human trafficking at sea, McKeever charts his globe-trotting escapades (for someone so environmentally conscious, he seems to spend a lot of time on planes) in search of a better understanding of this “Most Misunderstood” species.
His gamely, go-get-’em attitude to real-world experiences does yield a couple of genuinely memorable passages: a mako shark-hunting tournament in Montauk, Long Island, where local spectators enjoy a boozy day out as half-dead sharks are butchered for sport before their eyes; the Greenpeace boat Rainbow Warrior, whose crew risk their lives on a daily basis to police illegal fishing practices at sea.
Elsewhere, with the assistance of marine biologists at world-class institutions, he valiantly thrashes his way through research into shark behaviour that he so clearly hopes will enthuse his reader with a love for the species. I wanted to be enthused, I really did. But it was impossible to ignore the imagery, clichéd to the point of ludicrousness, that he trails lovingly through the pages, like blood left for a shark. One species’ teeth “flash like a dagger”; another is known to “fight like a prize fighter and have the heart to fight to the death.” At times, I felt like I’d wandered out of serious non-fiction and into a sixth-form creative writing class.
McKeever’s inexplicable dislike of pronouns, which leaves him helplessly repeating the same words over and over, like a malfunction, didn’t improve the reading experience. Nor did his taste for a bit of dramatic scene-setting (“red blood swirled in the blue water”), his seemingly random moralising (“To humans, it may seem cruel for the sea lion to be eaten alive, but that is nature’s way”), and his insistence on introducing anecdotes with “Here is a true story…”, which rather left me wondering if he’d made everything else up.
I am convinced that sharks need to be paid attention to in ways that don’t involve a theme-tune of alternating E and F-sharp, and I am almost as sure that McKeever is a decent, dedicated individual who is determined to get it for them. I just wish that I could have arrived at those certainties without having to read this book.
Emperors of the Deep is published by Williams Collins for £20. Call 0844 871 1514 or visit Telegraph Books to order from the Telegraph for £16.99
