handout
There may be no one in the world who knows more about sharks and the intricacies of their relationship to humans than Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin.
In the exhaustive research for Demon Fish, she goes far beyond the creatures' biology, past their spiritual meaning to us, the primal fears we have when we encounter them in the wild and the equally primal thrill of killing them, until finally she reaches a place of poignancy. What would the world look like without sharks and what will it take to avoid that?
Which is not to say the book is sappy. Despite that poignant undertone, for the most part, it's a steely-eyed and rather unemotional dissection of the many ways humans interact with sharks and why they do. Eilperin is game to go wherever any of our species goes to encounter a shark, whether it's to the shark-calling town of Tembin in Papua New Guinea, the shark-paste factory in Kesennuma City in Japan, a shark-watching operation in Isla Holbox in Mexico, or other ventures in Shanghai, Monaco, South Africa et al.
She investigates the Miami tourist-boat expedition of Mark "the Shark" Quartiano as some hung-over Brits on a stag party set out to kill a shark, and even makes her way to a restaurant on Hong Kong's Hennessy Road to try shark fin soup for herself.
Finning is the main reason so many sharks are killed each year and it's all done in the name of soup. Once a high-class treat, it's now the must-have menu dish for the wedding feasts of most middle-class Asian brides, and that's made it into a multi-billion-dollar business. Brantford, Ont. recently became the first Canadian city to ban the soup; other cities, including Toronto, are actively considering a ban.
One of the finest scenes in the book is the dismantling of the shark-fin soup mystique. Eilperin watches the staff of Hong Kong chef Norman Ho make shark-fin soup with ham, chicken and pork. The fin is insignificant, except for the status of finding a piece of it in the bowl. "There's no taste," Ho tells Eilperin, flatly. She realizes with a shock that the whole economic empire built around shark-fin soup is "one of the greatest scams of all time."
But for all the superb research and travel that went into this book, it is at times a frustrating read. Eilperin makes it clear in her final chapter and lengthy acknowledgments that she cares passionately about the fate of sharks, knows they are in danger and wants this book to help.
For instance, she wishes she had been able to give Peter Benchley a copy of the book. Benchley wrote the novel Jaws about a rogue great white shark that trolled for human flesh along a pristine sand beach off America's coast. He also helped write the screenplay for the 1975 blockbuster movie of the same name - and even had a bit part in it - that more than anything shaped the widespread conviction that sharks are inherently lethal, soulless and man-eating. Most of us can summon up in a heartbeat the image of those defenceless limbs dangling down into the water's depths as the pitiless predator sneaks up from below - NAH, nah, NAH, nah, NAH, nah.
Eilperin writes that Benchley spent the final decade of his life trying to undo the iconography he had helped to create about their thirst for human blood. He wanted to save sharks. Therefore, touchingly, she mourns that he can't read her book.
But where's the evidence that they're in danger? She repeatedly asserts that they are and that fact underpins her research, but gives us no big-picture numbers that will help us understand that, and while figures in the recent scientific literature (all of which she's read) are not comprehensive, there are enough of them to give a sense of the danger sharks are in. I was eventually reduced to flipping to the index entry "Sharks, threats to survival of," and dog-earing each page listed to see if I could figure it out on my own. Ultimately, I went to the scientific papers themselves to find the actual numbers proving they are in trouble.
And does that matter? It's not until the very end of the book that we find out what the shark means biologically to the ocean and understand that the system will unravel if sharks are to vanish. The stakes here are high.
Eilperin's book has the potential to revolutionize the way we think about sharks and it partly reaches the mark. Reading it is a little like sitting at a brilliant, scattered lecture and wishing you could say to the speaker: "Go back and do some more work on it. We'll wait here until you get back."
Alanna Mitchell is the author of Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, which won the Grantham Prize for Excellence in Environmental Reporting last year.