Rifling through the bookshelves at my grandmother’s house a
few years ago, I discovered that my grandfather used to make pencil notes in
the fronts of the books that he read. His intentions, I suppose, were a little
like my reasons for writing book reviews on this blog – a way of processing his
thoughts on what he had read, what he could learn from it. In one of them
(possibly something by Samuel Butler), I found the phrase ‘too much philosophy,
not enough plot’. Now, I like my books with a dose of philosophy, but I also
understand the need for an engaging story, so when I heard about The Raw Shark Texts, it seemed to be
just the sort of thing I was looking for. This book shares DNA with works by
Umberto Eco or Scarlett Thomas (and it was no surprise to see that latter named
in the acknowledgements page), blending the conventions of a tight thriller
with big philosophical ideas. We meet our protagonist, Eric Sanderson, with no
memory of his past or his identity – the victim of a Ludovican thought shark,
one of many species of conceptual fish which have evolved to swim in the ebb
and flow of human ideas. With no memory of his previous life, Eric is already
in critical condition, and it seems that the shark will return to eat away at
his consciousness until there is nothing left.
Thus starts a journey into ‘unspace’, the nameless service
roads, carparks and passageways which form the cracks in the modern world, to
find the one person who might be able to help. Along the way, Eric is joined by
‘Scout’, a young woman using unspace to hide from a shadowy and terrifying
being known as Mycroft Ward. I do not want to spoil Ward’s secret, but he is
one of the most original and unsettling antagonists I’ve read about recently.
Scout’s explanation of Ward’s backstory is one of the novel’s finest moments,
and it is just a shame that he stays too remote to feel like a real threat for
most of the book.
In some ways, this is very much a novel about how it feels
to be hunted, with Scout and Eric both running from forces which will not stop.
The idea of ‘unspace’ is also an attractive one – a sort of alternate world
which is both mysterious and mundane, and easily believable to anyone who has
ever explored and abandoned building, or looked into the organic, messy ways
that cities grow.
Scout is a well written character – plucky and adventurous,
but forced to live in a self-imposed exile which cuts her off from the real
world. She also acts as a useful guide, helping us to understand the world that
Hall presents us with. Though his
portrayal of the relationship between Scout and Eric, Hall demonstrates and
understanding that even if a fast paced thriller, tension comes from the
dynamic between characters as well as from external threats. However, Hall also
creates a connection between Scout and Sanderson’s dead fiancée which is never
satisfactorily explained. Novelists are entitled to maintain a sense of
mystery, but this one opens up possibilities which do not feel entirely
consistent with the rest of the story.
Mention of Clio Aames, Eric’s fiancée, brings me to another
element of the novel. Alongside the tense thriller, we are given a picture of
grief over the loss of a partner and a relationship which seem almost too
perfect. This is made somehow more poignant by the fact that the protagonist
has no memory of anything which happened before the start of the novel, and can
only find out about one of the defining parts of his life the same way we do –
by reading a fragment of a story written by his previous self. His most significant
relationship is essentially something which happened to somebody else.
The novel is particularly interested in identity and memory.
Eric draws a clear distinction between himself and ‘the first Eric Sanderson’. Our
memories of others can affect their identities too. We like to think our dead
loved ones live on somehow in our memory, but
Hall makes clear that this is just a version of that person – an image
seen from only one direction and distorting as we get further away: Hall calls
attention to this idea in making the relationship between Eric and Clio seem so
perfect. I wonder if the same principle applies to living people too; our ideas
of them may not match up with their ideas of themselves, and our true
identities probably lie somewhere between our own self-images and the images
that others have of us.
The question of identity is taken in a chilling new
direction by the Mycroft Ward subplot, which spoilers prevent me from detailing
here. That’s the great thing about
fiction – you can take and idea and stretch it to breaking point while
retaining the emotional impact which the abstractions of philosophy sometimes
lose. In the end though, the novelist must come to some sort of resolution.
After spending the majority of the novel feeling like an imitation of the first
Eric Sanderson, our protagonist is able to become the real thing, combining his
new experiences and adventures with those aspects of the original that he has
been able to glean from the record his predecessor left behind. While the
ending wraps up some of the philosophical questions a little too neatly, Hall
is able to draw the thriller plot to a satisfying conclusion.
The Raw Shark Texts is
not a perfect novel. It experiments with extracts of ‘found’ texts and with the
shapes of the text on the page in ways which never feel fully realised, and in
times of intense action the author adopts a rather breathless, fragmented style
of writing. Words flying off the paper. The reader struggling to maintain
footing. An author overusing the present participle. Perhaps it is just the
grammar nerd in me which objects to this, but I found that while the lack of a
proper main-verb to anchor the sentences helped to create a sense of pace, it
also jarred me out of the world of the novel and back on to the train, where
Eric Sanderson and the Ludovican existed only as names on a page. Despite these
criticisms, this is an ambitious and entertaining read which largely succeeds
in balancing philosophy and plot. There is also a cat called Ian, and as I
would recommend the book for that reason alone, we are both lucky that Hall
does such a good job.
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