The Raw Shark Texts | ||||||||||||||
Steven Hall | ||||||||||||||
Canongate Books, 368 pages | ||||||||||||||
A review by Seamus Sweeney
Edgar Allen Poe was once described by James Russell Lowell as "three-fifths genius, two-fifths sheer fudge" (and
who reads James Russell Lowell today, one might ask?). It might be a stretch to call any segment of The Raw Shark
Texts genius, but the second three-fifths certainly pass the fudge test. The first 130 pages, however, are
gripping. "Gripping" is one of those over-used terms of critical (or indeed sub-critical, being largely a staple
of the blurb writer) praise, but every so often a piece of prose exerts a physical power to keep one
reading. The Raw Shark Texts has this in spades, until typographic tricksiness and rather stale pseudo-avant
garde ideas about texts and communication intervene.
We begin with Eric Sanderson. He wakes in an ordinary yet unfamiliar suburban house to a new life, in the literal
sense of dissociative amnesia. He finds a card from "The First Eric Sanderson," the man he was, giving him
directions to a local psychologist, Dr. Randle. She tells him he has dissociative amnesia, and in a neat scene
explains the condition very well:
The Raw Shark Texts is generally written in a rather matey, blokey style. In
the beginning, this is part of the appeal, reinforcing the what-if-this-was-me effect
that most adventure stories evoke. However, as the book comes by, and especially as the
mythological and semiotic baggage gets heavier (more of which anon), the style
grates. At first, however, it captures perfectly the suburban dullness of Sanderson's house and town:
Apparently it's been claimed on the internet that Sanderson's house is in Derby, England.
Dr. Randle attempts to counsel Eric, but further postings from the First Eric Sanderson
warn him off the increasingly sinister psychologist. I don't want to set the scene too much
more, as these early chapters, with their sense of menace amidst mundanity, are by far
the best of the book. In the early films of M. Night Shyamalan, the thrill was seeing a
hoary comic-book conceit worked out in humdrum everyday life. In Unbreakable,
we saw what having superhuman powers might mean in everyday, dull life. What holds the
attention so viscerally in the early pages of The Raw Shark Texts is how
closely Eric Sanderson's attempts to make sense of his life tally with our own
attempts to make sense of what is going.
Reviewers of the book have gone straight to the multiplex (the headline of Tom
McCarthy's generally approving review in the London Review of Books)
in search of anchors of comparison. On the blurb, we have Mark Haddon pronouncing
it "the bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code"
while other anonymous critics invoke Jaws, Donnie Darko and
Memento. A particularly hysterical Scotsman raves "Steven Hall's brilliance
aspires to Bach", which is putting it pretty steep. As McCarthy observes in
the LRB, the book reads like a movie treatment, and a less than
innovative one in these post-Matrix days when Reality Is Not What It Seems
has become one of the great clichés.
The slew of movie comparisons provides a clue as to why I felt so let down by
The Raw Shark Texts. The 130 pages read like watching Memento -- the
heady sense of disorientation accompanying the gradual development of personal
theories about what the hell is going on. "Tricksy" isn't always a pejorative term,
and Memento showed how a hoary old convention -- the "experimental" or
"non-linear" narrative -- can sometimes enhance a plot, especially what is
essentially a mystery or whodunnit. The problem is, Memento told a
fundamentally simple story of lost love and of corruption. The Raw Shark Texts
includes a simple story of lost love and bereavement, but actually tells a story
of conceptual sharks.
Yes, you can't beat an old conceptual shark story, can you? As an aside, I'm not
ruining anything by telling you that Jaws is referenced and more than referenced
pretty heavily throughout the book. These sharks are virtual and yet not virtual,
for the world itself is virtual. Virtual sharks are made from bits and pieces of the
detritus of human interactions. Eric is cursed by, or rather with, a Ludovician. A
Ludovician is the Great White of the conceptual shark world, feasting on memories
and thoughts belonging to a vulnerable mind.
How does the Ludovician manifest itself in The Raw Shark Texts? Firstly,
in the relatively old fashioned means of purplish prose:
There is a sterility to these typographical experiments that leaks into the human
story of the book. Once you've seen one shark made up of characters on the page, you've
seen them all. Readers who persist with The Raw Shark Texts and who, like me,
are tiring somewhat of the whole proceedings can be of good cheer. Towards the
end -- just at the stage when you have read so far that 'tis more tedious to go back
than to go o'er -- we are treated to 40-odd nearly blank pages. Blank except for flick-book
style representations of a looming shark coming closer and closer.
To return to the plot, once the conceptual sharks appear, the taut mystery of the early
pages disappears, and we embark on a rather tedious exercise in a thriller of
memes. Essentially, Eric Sanderson goes in search of Dr. Trey Fidorous, a supposed expert
in the conceptual shark world. His search is aided by Scout, a girl of the irritating
pseudo-sassiness with which male writers encumber their attempts at strong young
female characters with. It turns out that Scout has been stricken with Mycroft
Ward. Mycroft Ward (note the hat-tip to Mycroft Holmes) was a Victorian who vowed to
cheat death. This proved physically impossible but psychically quite
straightforward -- Ward cataloguing the key aspects of his persona, and then
transferring them to a widowed doctor, who in later life began to repeat the process
with two other subjects. The personality of Mycroft Ward begins to take over more
and more people, and becomes an online entity, a gigantic self feasting off the selves
of others. The only thing that can destroy Ward is the Ludovician. Imaginative readers
can perhaps work out the terms of the final, Jaws-influenced climactic battle. Baffled
readers will probably never bother finding out.
The mythical ballast is as heavy as the conceptual one. The first Eric's girlfriend
is called Clio (muse of memory, don't you know) The tender, funny, ordinary love story
sequences are set on Naxos, where Theseus abandoned Ariadne. There's a boat called the
Orpheus. Was it Philip Larkin who objected to the lazy use of classical allusion to
evoke what should properly be described? Hall is trying too hard to give his love
story some resonance, to act as a balance to the conceptual sharks and Mycroft Ward
and such. It may make more sense in the multiplex, where the conceptual sharks may
find their natural home in the world of CGI, but on the page they remind one once
again that the avant-garde tricks of the early 20th century were an artistic blind
alley. The genie's bottle that is Reality Is Not What It Seems is a little like
the "It Was All A Dream" ending that all schoolchildren are taught to avoid for
their stories -- it imposes a narrative sterility, making it hard to take anything
entirely seriously. When everything is possible, nothing is at stake. When nothing
is at stake, all the fish in the conceptual ocean won't make your story interesting.
(This review first appeared on nthposition.com.)
Seamus Sweeney is a freelance writer and medical graduate from Ireland. He has written stories and other pieces for the website Nthposition.com and other publications. He is the winner of the 2010 Molly Keane Prize. He has also written academic articles as Seamus Mac Suibhne. |
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() |
If you find any errors, typos or anything else worth mentioning,
please send it to editor@sfsite.com.
Copyright © 1996-2014 SF Site All Rights Reserved Worldwide