The Trench Review

 (Video Version)

The Trench Review

Released in 1999, The Trench is the third entry in Steve Alten’s Meg series. The Trench takes place four years after the events of Meg A Novel of Deep Terror where our protagonist Jonas Taylor is now married to Terry Tanaka and also working at the Tanaka Institute where he is looking after the only surviving Megalodon pup that was captured at the end of the last book and held in the whale lagoon.

The book’s prologue begins in the Mariana Trench with a submersible named the Proteus is scouting the floor for helium isotopes as the captain Barry Leace frets over the safety of his crew and takes the safe option of slowing the Proteus’s speed to avoid the chances of colliding with a black smoker (hydrothermal vent) which would make a breach in the titanium hull and the pressure change would kill everyone onboard. Tension arises between Barry and Ellis Richards, the team leader over the pace that the exploration is taking and going outside a projected timetable and delaying the Prometheus and Epimetheus submersibles from doing their assigned tasks.

On arriving at their designated coordinates, the crew begin to take samples from a vent near a clump of tubeworms and things go smoothly at first when a number of blips appear on the sonar screen heading toward the Proteus. Barry wants to cease operations and retreat to the safety of the Benthos which is six kilometres behind them while Richards refuses to retract the mechanical arms which are still collecting the samples and he is insistent on securing them onboard before the unknown life forms collide with the Proteus.

The blips become stronger and faster on the sonar and it indicates that the approaching objects are to be forty feet long and Barry then ignites the lateral thrusters which turns the Proteus counter-clockwise and almost tearing the mechanical arms off and loosing every sample collected in the process. He then takes the Proteus to its top speed of 1.8 knots in an effort to get within visual range of the Benthos when it goes quiet and it’s followed by a sudden jolt and the crew are thrown around from the impact.

As Barry tries to regain control of the Proteus only to discover that the controls are not responding and a plate of the hull is loosening from the attack but now the Benthos is now in sight so Barry puts out an emergency radio call for the Benthos to open its hanger doors while the geologist of the team Linda tells him that it takes five minutes for the Benthos to fill the chamber. A whistling sound then fills the cabin of the Proteus because the integrity of the plates and another heavy impact rocks the submersible.

Barry looks to the port glass where his head just struck and see a luminous crimson eye peering in from the other side. The whistling ceases when a pair of rivets shoot out into the cabin and Barry’s head implodes before they hit the floor.

Then the book brings us to our protagonist Jonas Taylor who wakes up from a night terror where he was back in the Mariana Trench where he in a Lexan pod and he spots another Lexan pod with Terry unconscious inside and he then looked down into the dark abyss and sees a Megalodon rising towards Terry’s pod and watches it engulf the pod. Jonas and Terry start to share an intimate moment after Terry manages to calm Jonas down when they are interrupted by a phone call from his assistant Manny at the Institute’s lagoon saying he needs his help immediately.

About 20 minutes later, Jonas arrives at the lagoon in time for the captured Megalodon’s 10AM feeding with a capacity crowd eagerly waiting in the stands surrounding the tank. After arriving, Jonas goes to the underground viewing area where the Megalodon is swimming at that moment, The Megalodon nicknamed “Angel” now fully grown is 75ft long making her larger than her mother as well as proving to be much more vicious presses her head against the side of the tank and focuses her cataract-gray eye onto Jonas but Angel then disappears and heads towards the canal where a large side of beef is attached to an A-frame above the lagoon. Angel explodes from the water taking the food in a single bite and severally bending the A-frame in the process. Jonas and Manny discuss Angel’s behavior when it’s pointed out that Angel has been ramming her head against the doors that lead outside to the open ocean and it becomes clear that she wants out!

After reading the first book, I jumped into this sequel with baited breath... and I wasn't disappointed.

The story begins with our hero from the first book Jonas Taylor and his life being in a right mess. After successfully killing the Megalodon in the first book, he captured her remaining offspring, a female pup to go and put on display at the Tanaka Institute. Jonas has now married his friend Masao's daughter Terry and everything seemed to be going great. Then lawsuits started to roll in with the families and friends of all the victims of the Megalodon began looking for compensation.

Jonas, Masao and the Tanaka Institute were easy targets because of their bold attempt to capture the Meg instead of just killing it and allowed the body count to rise. Jonas now is trapped working at the Institute displaying the nearly fully grown Megalodon named Angel to the public with nearly every penny received going straight into another compensation settlement. Jonas feels the strain from the trials and is haunted by the Megalodon, having re-occurring nightmares of how the beast will one day kill him.

This puts a great strain on his marriage to Terry and further disaster strikes when as Jonas has predicted Angel becomes too big to imprison at nearly 75ft, she is much larger then her mother was and eventually she smashes free from the Lagoon and enters the open ocean and Jonas is obligated by the Institutes owners to go after the Meg and re-capture her, but all is not quite as it seems.

Now sequels are often a tough thing to get right the questions are:

Can the second installment of a film series or book recapture the magic of the first, and still be fresh and also can it stand on its own if you don't know the first one.

Fortunately, Steve Alten's second outing in the Meg series does everything right. You get more of what was brilliant about the first book - the characters, the little marine biology lessons, the spectacular set-pieces of shark on human action as well as a general upping of stakes across the board  while also getting some exciting new ideas and concepts, some of which survive to take their place in the Meg universe, and some of which are devoured by the queen of the seas by the book's end.

If you thought the first book was a nice idea that had run its course after 400-odd pages, I say think again. The Trench still has some surprises for you.

However I do have a couple of things to nick pick as well as a few praises to address:

• Terry Tanaka

Personally I like how her character has grown and developed in the time between the first book and this one where she is a much stronger character than before and more willing to take action given the situations she is placed in throughout The Trench. Even before the events of The Trench, Jonas & Terry suffer great emotional trauma with the loss of their first child who died in the womb at 8 months and this is used by both antagonists Benedict and Celeste Singer to hurt her and the way Terry bounces back is nothing short of inspirational.

• Bin Laden

Surprised? I was too. Bin Laden is named in the book as one of Benedict’s financial backers for the expedition into the Mariana Trench to collect rocks which contain the rare gas Helium-3 in order to create fusion that can be weaponized. His inclusion here to me seems like it was just thrown in at the last minute as a means to make Benedict a more imposing and threatening antagonist.

• New creatures

This is not a bad thing because we now have a new threat which adds variety instead of just having the Meg and human characters. This also adds an element of mystery as to what else lives in the trench besides the Megalodons.

• Celeste Singer

I personally hated her so much. If you thought that Jonas’ wife from the last book Maggie was bad then Celeste Singer makes her look like the innocent girl next door. I can also extend this to Benedict who at times come off a bit as a one dimensional character instead of being the multi-leveled personality that he tries to present.

So in conclusion, The Trench overall I think this a great follow-up to Meg A Novel of Deep Terror with more character development, action, emotional drama and most surprising some elements of espionage worked into an already thrilling story. I won't spoil the ending but I will say this book had me hooked just like the first book. In fact after reading this book I straight away went to reading the third in the series Primal Waters.

So if you've read Meg by this book now, if you haven't get both you will not regret them.

The Trench is available in paperback, hardback, in all e-book formats, audiobook from all good book shops.