The Raw Shark Texts

"since his death my Granddad had become more a collection of scenes than a real man to me." (79)

When I was assigned to teach The Modern Novel, I wanted to teach a novel about being a book-- in the physical sense. Novels are often books, of course, but in this electronic age they don't have to be. My students were pretty split on the far-out ideas Hall advances in The Raw Shark Texts-- some thought the book was baffling in the extreme, others thought it was the coolest thing they'd ever read. I'm okay with such a contradiction.

We read the book in the context of what N. Katherine Hayles in Writing Machines calls the "technotext": "When a literary work interrogates the inscription technology that produces it." (An "inscription technology" show more is a device that initiates material changes that can be read as marks, e.g., print books, computers, telegraphy, video and film, basically any technology that produces interpretable, linguistic information.) When a print book calls attention to the fact that it is a print book, it is a technotext, and Hayles argues that you should look at technotexts not just to see what the text "means," but how that meaning interacts with the material form of the text. (Hayles has actually written about The Raw Shark Texts herself, but ended up going in a different direction than what I'm going to do with her ideas here.)

The Raw Shark Texts is preoccupied with inscription technologies and how we're remediated through them: there's the quotation I opened this review with, but also: the idea that when a person dies, they leave an afterimage in the machinery they set up to run their life, which slowly runs down and dies itself (101); "I think we’re going to wear away from the world, just like the writing wears off old gravestones in the aisles of churches" (229); the narrator, Eric, reading the guidebook of Clio, a woman he supposedly had a relationship with but doesn't remember (266); Eric's admission that the journal we're reading is incomplete: they were never that witty or cool, Clio wasn’t always sexy, and all he has now is stories: "well edited tall tales with us in the starring roles," as the characters in the journal aren’t the two of them but actors regurgitating Hollywood clichés (412-13). And of course The Raw Shark Texts itself is a life remediated through an inscription technology: we only know what happened to Eric Sanderson because we have this book to tell us.

The book ends ambiguously. Did Eric die? Was anything Eric experienced even real? My students wanted to say "no" to the latter question, that he was hallucinating to cope with grief, but I reject that interpretation on the grounds of it not being very interesting. As for the first question, I think it depends on what you mean by "die." As the book emphasizes over and over again, we are the marks we make on the world. We are the scrapbooks, the gravestone inscriptions, the journals, the stories we wrote down about ourselves. Eric Sanderson didn't die fighting the conceptual shark, and we know this because we're holding Eric Sanderson in our hands. The Raw Shark Texts records his very existence. He is the sum of the inscription technologies used to mark his place in the world, much as we all are. The postcard at the end of the book-- another inscription technology-- shows that he continues to exist, that he hasn't worn away from the world yet. show less

Oh, the promise this novel held. The sheer possibility of greatness.

Too bad Hall couldn't bring it home.

I absolutely devoured the first half of this story. I was on board for the full ride, happily nodding along as it got weirder and weirder. Theoretical memory-devouring sharks? Sure.

And the characters where amazing. Clio, in particular. I could feel myself completely understanding why Eric loved her. Hell, I was falling in love with her myself.

I was onboard for the whole search for Fidorous. Yup, I was good for the full ride. And this is where I will simply warn you about the serious SPOILER I'm about to drop. Honestly, if you haven't read the book and plan to, stop now, because I'm going to officially kill the second half of the show more book.

You've been warned.




Somewhere just past the middle, Hall veered distressingly away from all that promise, all that possibility. I am never more disappointed than when a theoretical model is set up, a strange, hard to grasp yet somehow workable idea, a feat of overwhelming imagination, is presented, then, for the purposes of story, the author diverts to a banal real-world model. That's exactly what Hall did.

Seriously. The last 200-ish pages of this novel (including 60 pages of typography illustrated shark to, you know, made it edgy) is about the last 45 minutes of the movie version of Jaws .

No. Seriously.

He couldn't even be bothered to change anything up. It's like he didn't know what the hell to do, so he just turned on the TV, saw a rerun of a movie and thought, hell, yeah, I can steal that!

I have rarely felt so cheated by a book as I feel with this one. Hall? You're a smart guy and a good writer (the ONLY reason you got two stars instead of one), but you committed an unpardonable sin here: You fucked over your readers.

Leave this one to die. It'll only be good when it's floating belly up in the tank. show less

I was initially going to say that this book is the lazier person's "House of Leaves" - but that sounds more critical and dismissive than my actual experience of reading it. The Raw Shark Texts is a novel about, I suppose, loss, at the highest level - it chronicles one man's crumbling apart from within following the death of his girlfriend in an accident in the Greek Isles. But very close to that highest level is some exploration of language and its relationship to meaning; how connected words are to actual things, and what can happen in the absence of that connection. The author explores these ideas overtly, creating a narrative about "unspaces" and the use of actual words to build things that are experienced as real.

I found some of the show more story unconvincing - these are ideas that appeal to me greatly, and to many of my favorite writers. Indeed, Hall seems to have similar tastes - there are quotes from Murakami, Calvino, and others throughout the pages. But there is something lacking here - I think perhaps Hall's theory is unclear, and so it comes confusedly through the pages. His ideas are wonderful, but I think he needs more work to flesh them out clearly. Ambiguity can enhance a book when skillfully deployed, but the gaps here often seem less intentional.

Despite this, I enjoyed the book a great deal, and I believe fans of Eco particularly, as well as Danielewski and Murakami - and Stephenson and Eco - would enjoy it as well. It's clever and interesting, and the narrator is reasonably compelling and appealing. show less

The cover bears the quote:

"The bastard love child of the Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code. Very entertaining."
--Mark Haddon

That's not what I would have said about it though. It's more Nolan than Wachowski and infinitely more Borges than Brown. There is a huge fucking shark though.

A conceptual shark.

It starts with a man regaining consciousness. He doesn't know who he is or where he is...but there's a letter on the table for him, Eric Sanderson, from the first Eric Sanderson. This is the first of many of letters from the first of Eric Sanderson, usually signed "with regret and also hope". Initially Eric ignores his former self's correspondence as advised by his psychologist. It will just set back his recovery she says. But as things show more get stranger and a new threat appears Eric turns to his collection of unopened letters for answers.

It seems, according to the letters, Eric's condition is not the simple dis-associative state he's been told. No, Eric Sanderson was preyed upon by a conceptual fish. A beast not of flesh and bones but of ideas. A beast that hungered not for his flesh, but his Eric-ness, and ate until there was nothing left.

I'd like to say more, but it's not the sort of book about which you can say much with certainty. Hall plays deftly with the surreal while grounding it in the real. After all, what is more tenacious than and idea? More dangerous than a doubt? Is there any parasite more damaging than our own misplaced fixations and errant convictions?

I'm also undecided on how I actually interpret Eric's journey. Did the first Eric pull off an amazing feat of surrealistic heroism, or was he simply a tragic figure driven to madness by his own pain? Is this a man surviving against all odds in mad world or a mad man quietly slipping out of a real world he can no longer cope with? There are no easy answers here.

I'm probably going to have to read it again. show less

One morning as Eric Sanderson awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into himself. Except he doesn't remember the uneasy dreams. He doesn't remember himself. He's got more or less complete amnesia (think Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - he's forgotten everything about himself, but every piece of historical and pop-cultural trivia, every turn of phrase, every cultural meme is still there). He's a blank slate. Except for the letters his old self keeps sending him, warning him of a conceptual shark - the idea of a predator, lurking in the stream of information surrounding all human interaction, and feeding on memories. The ultimate representation of self-destructive thoughts.

You'd think the best thing that could show more have happened to Eric - the new Eric, Eric II - would have been if Eric I had never told him about this, because once he knows, the shark is after him too. And so he has to set out on a quest to find himself - literally and figuratively, in both the subterranean and subtextual world under the consensus of what life in 21st century Britain is like. (Possibly, he's mad and it's all in his head. Possibly, the shark is very real. Possibly, both; after all, if you have an idea in your head, then that idea is real - the only reality there is, perhaps?)

It's difficult to explain, but it's really a quite clever idea, weaving in themes about language, subjective construction of reality, memetic mutation and evolution, dealing with grief, and a bunch of stuff that might have fit well in a Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami story (unsurprisingly, Hall namedrops both, along with Borges and other metafictional superstars). He's not quite the writer it takes to say anything truly profound about it, and rather than a new Kafka On The Shore it ends up more as a mixture of Snow Crash and Neverwhere with some unfortunate overtones of the Big Purple Dan Brown Book Which Shall Not Be Named. But hey, I really like two of those, and as metaphysical thrillers go it's entertaining. I'll put up with some clunky prose if it serves an original idea, and for a long while it does.

So I'm coasting along merrily on the streams of consciousness - not stream-of-consciousness - in Eric's wake until I hit the last 120 pages. Which, without giving away any details, are anything but original. In fact, I've both read and seen them. As in literally scene by scene, word for word. I get the point of it, but there's using pop culture references to make a point and there's outright plagiarism, and the fact that the characters acknowledge the original in the text while playing it out only makes it all the more stupid, and the book sinks like a stone.

Beach closed. show less

The book struck me as a sort of cross between The Eyre Affair and House of Leaves, combining the sort of inventive alternate realities of Fforde with the pomo typographical play of Danielewski. As with most X meets Y formulations, this one does not really do the book justice. Despite Hall's invetive metatextual world of word sharks, un-spaces, thought virus tycoons and conceptual boats the emotional core of the story is the protagonist's attempts to come to grips with the past and his own grief, guilt, memory. (A comparison with the movie Memento might also be apt, though Shark is more hopeful, less nihilistic.) An engaging, playful, but also very moving book.

A man wakes up on the floor at the foot of a double bed without any memory of who or where he is. He finds a wallet in his pocket with a driver license that says "Eric Sanderson" -- but the name doesn't ring any bells. He wanders into the hall down the stairs and spies a small table with an envelope and a phone. From the envelope he pulls out two sheets of paper and reads,

"Eric,

First things first, stay calm.

If you are reading this, then I'm not around anymore."

The pages direct him to press speed dial one on the phone and to not explore the house. Signed by The First Eric Sanderson.

"The Raw Shark Texts" follows the Second Eric Sanderson as he tries to piece together what happened to his memory. His trek takes him across England, deep show more into the Un-Space in search of Dr. Trey Fidorous who may hold the key to his memory loss and to the strange creature that's hunting him -- the Ludovician, a shark created from words, concepts and ideas but is all too real.

Steven Hall creates a fantastic world -- the Un-Space -- in which words and ideas take form in what resembles sea life: lampropini, flatwolds, jarhaphish, and ludovicians (what would be great white sharks in the real world). Words also can protect, such as by repeating a mantra, stacking books around you so the ideas confuse predators or gathering a bunch of old typewriter letters into a ball and using them as a word bomb. His characters are very well drawn from the woman Scout who assists Eric on his quest to find Dr. Fidorous and somehow resembles a woman he should know, to Eric Sanderson as a man with nothing to loose and everything to gain, to the Ludovician and Mr. Nobody, creatures of the Un-Space, made of words but teeming with life.

"The Raw Shark Texts" is a fast-paced thrill ride that anyone who loves words and ideas and what can be done with them will definitely enjoy. show less