Maynard is a frustrated journalist who gave up on writing anything important and settled into his life as a magazine writer, churning out assignments but enjoying some freelance work. One day, he stumbles across an amazing statistic: boats are disappearing in the Caicos Islands area of the Caribbean at a steady rate in numbers too high not to beg for an explanation. His editor, though not as excited about it as Maynard, gives him enough encouragement for Maynard to impulsively take a trip, dragging his 12-year-old son Justin along for the ride.The Caicos are rather remote, and Maynard only manages to get there by hiring a drunken pilot who crashes his plane on landing. Left with time on his hands, Maynard coerces a friendly, retired professor into renting him a boat so he and his son can go fishing, then ignores the professor’s warnings about areas to stay away from, and soon finds out firsthand just exactly why all those boats have gone missing.He finds himself in a hidden island society governed by a harsh set of rules. The islanders welcome his young son into their midst, but Maynard is on borrowed time. He knows he has to escape and remove his impressionable son from the clutches of the islanders before they turn him into someone he doesn’t recognize, but his attempts all fail, and it seems hopeless. Even worse, it isn’t long before Justin seems to forget him and allies himself with the brutal islanders.Though this book put forth an interesting concept, when it was all said and done, there were too many inconsistencies in the plot for me to truly enjoy it. The idea of a society hidden away from the rest of the world for over 300 years was an interesting one, as well as the history concocted for it, but the characters did not ring true. Justin went from a cowering wimp who did nothing to defend himself or his father from an attack at the outset, to a murderer well on his way to leadership in a matter of days. Maynard was also too passive and his doomed escape attempts got annoying. A number of other angles in the plot were also contrived in a way that simply was not believable. I generally find Peter Benchley to be a very engaging writer, but not this time out. Perhaps his publisher rushed this one along, because it is not as well-woven as anything else he has written.
****1/2I read this back-to-back with Peter Benchley's "The Deep" while on a recent beach vacation. A person could do a lot worse than Benchley, as far as beach reads go."The Island" is just as vicious and exciting as I remembered from my first experience with it as a kid. The basic plot remained in my head (helped by the boring but mostly "faithful" film adaptation), along with a few moments that affected me as a child--notably the use of urine to counteract jellyfish wounds; the casual killing of a baby bird; and a pirate woman grabbing the main characters genitals and declaring he owed her a child. Probably the ideal thriller for a ten-year-old, and I'm glad Mom didn't insist on reading it before allowing me to.This is a modern pirate story. A New York journalist travels down to Turks and Caicos, which in the late seventies, was not the tourist destination it is today, to investigate the disappearance of 600-plus boats over the last three years. He and his son are captured and taking back to an island populated by savage folks carrying on in the tradition of the Pirates of the Caribbean. It's an adventure story, but a very dark one. I re-watched the movie version, starring Michael Caine, recently, and one of the most jarring aspects of that film is the way the "attack" scenes are handled. Pirates assault innocents at sea to the tune of a triumphant, traditional swashbuckling soundtrack. It makes sense in a way, but the scenes unfolding are more like horror movie sequences than anything else, and the contrast between the music and images is just strange. Maybe in the hands of another director it might have worked, I don't know.The book, with its combination of island adventure and "The Hills Have Eyes"-style horror scenes, works wonderfully. The relationship between main character Maynard and his young son, set up in the beginning, is integral to the story, and there are some interesting father-son develops that take place after their capture. "The Island" also features one of Benchley's trademark sudden endings.
What do You think about The Island (1979)?
Peter Benchley has a great deal of knowledge about the high seas and the dangers that sailors encounter. He weaves this knowledge seamlessly into this story of a young boy and his father as they go on an adventure to find out why more than 600 ships had disappeared over the past year (an actual fact that had lead him to the idea of this book). I felt I learned a few things from this book and I was entertained along the way. I'd say that's a pretty good deal and would recommend this book. It's always fun to read stuff that was written during your childhood (this is early seventies), and relive how people got along without computers and cell phones and because I lived through those years I can fill in the blanks and relate to how things were then.
—Lesley
The island itself is a symbol of a primal world frozen in time. It exists before the fishing boat that opens the story. From the moment the violent man appears at sea, terror rules in the background. Presently, a social dialog develops from which the vulnerability of people and relationships becomes the foreground. The narrative is an unusual but engaging description of events that gets interrupted by brutality. The description is essentially one long transition to show the boredom of everyday life in the context of a savage terror that lurks on the island. A dreadful hallucination takes over before a beastly reality brings the story to a conclusion. What begins as a hijacked boat ends as a complex scene of the crises of men.
—Jasmine McAlpine
I have to admit, I enjoyed this book a lot more than I expected to. I was pretty much in the mood for something like this when I picked it up, a fast moving thriller. I was expecting to give it 4 stars through most of it, but as I got to the end, it fell off the rails. this book was in desperate need of a different ending. There will be spoilers past this point in my review, in case you want to stop here. I think it was at the point where Manuel "helps" Maynard and Justin "escape" things become impossible. There's no way Manuel could have rigged the boat to sink. It would have been better had Maynard just decided to return for Justin. At least I could have accepted that. It only gets worse from there as the pirates trick there way onto the Coast Guard vessel. We even have a set up like in Jaws when they make sure to point out the explosive nature of the air tanks. Did anyone NOT realize the tank would be involved in the killing of the shark? Here it's the sailor cleaning the mounted machine gun. You had to know it would be used in some way. I'm not sure what would have made a better ending, but it's hard to imagine one could come up with a worse one than this.I decided to watch the movie after I read the book. In this case Benchley also wrote the screenplay. I'm not sure whose decision it was to change the ending for the movie, but it was a really good call. While it still had some of the same problems, some were eliminated. As I was watching the end, I came up with what would have been a much better closing scene. In the movie Justin ends up tied up by the last surviving pirate. His father fights the pirate and wins. He walks over to Justin. Eventually he hugs him and unites him. Instead it would have been better if he'd looked into his sons eyes and asked, "What's your name?" Because it would have been entirely possible if he answered with his pirate name, he might have tried to kill his father once free. If he answered Justin, his father would have known it was safe to free him.
—David Merrill
