Released in 2004, Meg Primal Waters is the forth entry in
Steve Alten’s Meg series. Meg Primal Waters takes place eighteen years after
the events of The Trench where we find our protagonist Jonas Taylor now nearly 64
years old and struggling with providing for himself and his wife Terry and
their extended family.
The book’s prologue starts 18,000 years ago during the Late
Pleistocene where the book explains about the environmental changes that took
place since the last Ice Age and the continental shifts which would eventually
form our modern world. All the changes in the climate in turn then start to
affect the migratory routes of all manner of animal species. The book then goes
to focus on a juvenile whale shark feeding in the Pacific Ocean while
completely unaware that it is being stalked by a 57ft female Megalodon which is
nearly to term with its pregnancy.
The female Megalodon goes to ready herself to attack the
whale shark when directly underneath, another Megalodon appears from the depths
forcing the female to break off while the male Megalodon proceeds to eviscerate
its freshly killed prey. The female hangs around till nightfall and eventfully
leaves to search for more food to feed herself and her undernourished unborn
young but only finding prey no bigger than a tortoise over the course of three
days and the famished Meg then arrives at an island atoll.
In the present day in Tampa Bay, Florida here we find our
protagonist Jonas Taylor writing his memoirs recollecting the events of how he
had killed the Megalodon that had risen from the Mariana Trench twenty two
years previously by his wife Terry’s insistence since he quit working for the
Tanaka Institute and the once never-ending flow of requests for him to talk at
various venues has dried up. Jonas’s concentration is broken when a bill
collector from American Express calls and inquires about a mailed check which
results in Jonas putting the receiver down after telling the collector to check
back the following week and then returning to writing when his concentration is
broken again and this time it’s by the gangsta rap coming from upstairs.
Jonas then heads to his daughter’s room and after banging on
the door repeatedly, an angry 17 year old Danielle Taylor answers the door and the
encounter between them ends bitterly and Jonas then checks in with his son 14
year old David Taylor who is more interested in playing a game based off his
father’s encounters with the Megs but always plays as Angel because “it’s more
fun” than the mini-sub. Terry arrives home from shopping and Jonas helps to
bring them in but in doing so sees the damage to Dani’s car and discovering a
bag of marijuana hidden under the seat which adds to his already painful
migraine.
Meanwhile at the Tanaka Institute in Monterey, a very
elderly Masao Tanaka now at 82 years old looks out at the lagoon which was once
going to be his realised lifelong dream but in pursuing it, he had depleted his
family fortune and mortgaged his children’s futures and which the funds ran out
he accepted a contract with JAMSTEC in exchange for twenty five UNIS drones to
be deployed along the Mariana Trench as an early warning system for
earthquakes. However with a large number of the drones suddenly ceasing
transmissions and the threat of losing the partnership of JAMSTEC forced Masao
to enlist Jonas’s help in retrieving one of the UNIS drones to assess the
damage and what caused it.
This leads to the attack on his son DJ’s sub by a
Megalodon and ultimately trapping it in the steel cable attached to the sub
itself where it is attacked and killed by a larger pregnant female Megalodon
which leaves the Mariana Trench to wreak havoc across the ocean and also giving
birth to three pups which only one survived and is captured after Jonas killed
its mother and placed in the whale lagoon for daily shows. However a series of
court cases from the kin of the Megalodon’s victims severely cripple and affect
the Tanaka Institute which forced Masao to sell to the energy mogul Benedict
Singer and with his death aboard the Benthos, the Tanaka Institute’s ownership
returned to Masao.
Three years after Angel’s escape, the lagoon doors of the
lagoon were opened again and for their original purpose of acting as a
protected cove for whales to enter and birth their young. But whales refuse to
enter due to being “spooked” by Angel’s lingering presence.
Masao took a loan
from Jonas for draining and scrubbing the tank to remove Angel’s scent to no
avail and now deep in debt and options becoming scarce, Masao agrees to lease
the facility to SeaWorld to house about six of their Orcas. However despite the
whales being born and bred in captivity the second the whales were placed
inside the waters of the lagoon, they panic and eventually with nowhere to
beach they bash their heads against the doors desperately to escape and two of
them died as a result and the contract with SeaWorld ended with the incident.
Now Masao is desperate to sell off the facility which is
becoming harder with everything that has happened and the costs just to
maintain it has wiped out his pension and the savings of several potential
buyers following the collapse of the stock market. This also leads to Masao
getting a loan from Dietsch Brothers who also want to buy the land to turn the
beachfront and lagoon into “million dollar” condos and a high-end shopping
marina. Masao refuses on the basis of their offer being too low and the fact he
doesn’t trust the brothers.
Meanwhile Jonas and his family attend the Venice Beach Shark
Tooth Festival where Jonas is to give a talk which is one of the main events. Once
Jonas begins his talk, Dani leaves for a walk round and eventually coming
across a stand where contestants for a TV show called DareDevils is placed where
she meets and talks with Fergie a member of one of the teams taking part in the
new season when they are interrupted by Jennie another member of the same team
who gives Dani a little attitude concerning a plane jump that Fergie is to take
part in for promoting the show and after some goading from Jennie, Dani agrees
to also participate in the stunt.
Back on the ground after selling some leftover signed
pictures of Angel when she was in the lagoon, Jonas is approached by the
producer of DareDevils Erik Hollander who asks Jonas to be a guest co-host for
the new season of DareDevils to add a “colour” commentary and after a lengthy
talk with his wife Terry and in need of income (offered $150,000 for the job) plus
the lure of recapturing some degree of youth is too hard to pass up and Jonas
accepts but under a condition set by Terry that their daughter Dani goes with
him. But little do any of them know that Angel after eighteen years has
returned from the Mariana Trench into surface waters.
So like its predecessors, Primal Waters
throws us back into the adventures of Jonas Taylor, his family and the ever
present Angel, the Megalodon that we were first introduced to back in the
previous book The Trench. Also back in Primal Waters is the detail of the Meg’s
sensory perception and the attack sequences which add a great level of depth
and are always welcome and like with the last book, Steve Alten ups the ante again
by having three Megs including the fearsome Angel which means a higher body is
sure to follow as a result. However the book seems to have more flaws than the
previous entries in the series.
The flaws are as follows:
- Story Direction:
While the first two books were written in the past tense,
Primal Waters is written in the present tense and personally at times, I found
that the story itself felt like it didn’t flow as well the previous books did.
On another aspect here is the reality TV plotline which is a change from the
usual “shark escapes and goes on killing spree” which is great because
repeating the same story over and over makes it a stale and ultimately boring
experience. The reality TV inclusion in the plot here seems rather weak and
somewhat cliché in this age where such entertainment has a large influence in
network programming.
- Weak Characters:
Now in Primal Waters, we do get a larger cast of characters
than the previous books but the majority of them make us as readers not care
about them. I’ll start with Jonas and Terry here by saying while it would be natural
for both of them to have some degree of PTSD (especially Terry) after what they
went through onboard the Benthos and Benedict Singer. However their portrayal
in Primal Waters is mostly a caricature of them where despite the fact that
they are both intelligent, they seem to know nothing about raising their kids.
While Jonas is overly strict at times while at others lazy or even half-hearted,
Terry is overprotective and doesn’t like taking any risks which is a complete
180 twist on her character in The Trench which I was blindsided by. Moving on
to the kids David and Danielle Taylor, firstly they are a stereotypical take on
teenagers with both not really interested in what their parents say.
However David is the lesser of two evils because he is
developed well as the book goes on while Dani is an
overdone cliché of a sulky teenager, she is self-absorbed, foolish, devoid of
respect for her father or anyone else for that matter, has the morals of an
alley cat, and the IQ comparable to the whole cast of Geordie Shore. Her
reaction to getting caught naked with Fergie an Australian stuntman by her
father is to show no degree of shame, but rather disgust and then berating her father for interrupting her. All of this makes it really difficult to care
for her even when she’s in danger of being eaten by a Megalodon.
Next is the entire cast of DareDevils,
all of them have similar personalities and moral codes so they are all
interchangeable and unmemorable so overall they add nothing to this story other
than add to the body count.
And lastly we come to the antagonist
Michael Maren who was a minor antagonist in The Trench working for Celeste
Singer. While in The Trench he seemed to be more fleshed out despite his
limited appearances, here in Primal Waters he appears to be a now one
dimensional character with only the most basic of intentions which is to get
revenge on Jonas mostly due to jealousy and partly because of Celeste’s death and
also on Mac because he winded Maren and then tied him up and proceeded to dump
him about 40 miles from Bethel in western Alaska. Because of this in
Primal Waters, Maren has lost his toes on his feet as a result of frostbite and
later on he tries to pull off a hearts and mind stunt where Maren while on
camera appears to want to save the DareDevils from an attacking Megalodon which
in reality is being somewhat controlled by Maren himself to kill Jonas with a
drone off-camera while also trying to portray Jonas as insane.
- Time Skip:
The whole 18 years later aspect of
Primal Waters doesn’t seem to work out well. David is still listening to a Walkman,
TV shows are still shooting in film, and Jonas, who is supposed to be in his
60’s sure doesn’t act his age at times.
So despite these flaws, Meg Primal Waters is still an
entertaining read with a much more brisker pace and across three different locales
with Jonas & Dani with the DareDevils, David Taylor and the freshly
reformed James “Mac” Mackreides (who has become an alcoholic and has a strained
friendship with Jonas) searching for Angel and Terry investigating attacks on
whales on the Eastern Coast which keeps things interesting throughout. Fans of the deep will be disappointed
that all the action stays near to the surface of the ocean this time around,
but personally I think the change of scenery was a good thing. This book had all
the same elements as the last Meg book, yet it was a story that stands well on
its own, and it’s anything but a retread of The Trench.
On top of the changes is the inclusion of two more Megs beside the returning Angel. The two new Megs are both male (one being the "runt" of one of Angel's previous litters) and their introduction adds variety instead of just focusing on Angel. The first new Meg is called Scarface due to having a facial scar from a fight with another Meg over territory and is every bit as vicious as Angel herself while the other unnamed Meg is more wary but still dangerous. We also get a hint from Maren that there is something even bigger than the Megs lurking in the trench.
Overall a great continuation of the Meg
series. I truly enjoyed Primal Waters and the twists/turns that it had for me
as the reader. Mr Alten does an excellent job of putting you squarely in the
action making you feel, see and smell as if you were right there with the
characters.
Meg Primal Waters is available in
paperback & hardback.
