Book review: Rough-hewn character Quint’s journey of horror is a tour de force

Robert Lautner's novel has a unique voice that draws you in and ensures that you’ll accompany Quint on his journey even though you’re witnessing much horror

Robert Shaw, who plays Quint, in a scene from the Spielberg blockbuster film ‘Jaws’.

• Quint 
• Robert Lautner 
• The Borrough Press, €18.99 

This compelling, at times scary novel, set in often shark-infested waters, reads like a character study of Captain Quint (played by Robert Shaw in the Spielberg movie, Jaws) which reveals itself in the two seminal stories of this fictional character’s life.

The context is a document found after Quint’s death, detailing his Second World War experience on board the ill-fated Indianapolis, and an acutely distressing fishing experience nine years later off the fictional island of Amity. 

These events, in this prequel to the film, are relayed in flashback fashion with visceral descriptions of blood and human waste that at times are repulsive.

The Indianapolis was the last American battleship to sink in the war when it was on its way back from ferrying uranium and the parts of the atomic bomb which destroyed Hiroshima.

The crew of 900 entered the water only to be confronted with man-eating sharks.

 Many died in terrible circumstances but the hardy Quint lived to tell the tale despite five days at sea with no food or drinkable water, accompanied by hallucinations and moments of delirium.

 He stared death in the face. He half-feared survival.

Quint is a rough-hewn character who is not likeable. But there is something fascinating about his pugnacious nature. 

Although he doesn’t come across as well-educated with his blunt and truncated use of language, he makes references to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.

Despite his apparent limitations, Quint sometimes surprises with philosophical observations as well as literary ones that point to a man who has spent a lot of time on his own, giving him ample opportunity to reflect on the human condition.

He is essentially a loner who, despite acknowledging the dangers of the sea, says that he has the “itch” to go out to it again, “the itch to be lonely”. 

The Irish-American seaman observes: “The real Earth is the sea, and she claims more of the land back every year. And more of us when she can. Turning us back to the sea, from where we came.”

Quint, who is from Boston, has recently lost his third wife, Effa, when we encounter him early on in the narrative. He plans to deal with the bereavement by working and drinking his way to California. 

Leaving his self-built shack behind and burying his boat, his belongings are a pick-up truck, rifles, and reels. 

A heavy drinker, he states: “Let no one tell you that a bottle hurts. I had no friends who might give kind words. I came out of the Navy a dead man walking.” 

He was drunk most of the time on the road and could go “whole days without seeing another soul. Nothing sweeter than that ...”. 

On his road trip, dropping off in bars, he gets into fights including a memorable one with a Chinese man, resulting in Quint damaging his arm. 

It’s all grist to the mill for this bearer of scars and tattoos that tell the only yarns from his life worth telling, as far as Quint is concerned.

Cut to the war experience when the Indianapolis has sunk. “Just minutes before, we had been covered by steel and blankets ... and then nothing.

“Miles of nothing below us, miles above and a million miles of water about our necks. It was like something had hit the earth, like what killed the dinosaurs and now we were the last of them.”

I didn’t expect to like this book. But it has a unique voice that draws you in and ensures that you’ll accompany Quint on his journey even though you’re witnessing much horror. It’s a real tour de force.

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