The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

I looked at her and a voice
inside me said, we only see starlight
because all the stars are bleeding.

I’ve been rooting through old folders looking for my publishing debut (as an adult anyway – my first ever publication was as a pre-tween poet: a particularly cynical alliterative poem about the pointlessness of any creative endeavour, and now lost to the annals of pre-internet history [some might say thankfully!]), as this was one of the very first books I was paid (actual money) to review. It was either for the Western Mail Saturday magazine, or the Waterstones Books Quarterly, or the Waterstones booksellers’ microsite. I can’t exactly recall (which may be why I can’t find it). In any event, it was pre-publication in 2007 and I never actually owned a finished copy of the novel – I had a loose-leaf, unbound A4 manuscript with the title scrawled on the front cover in Sharpie – which is why, when Maxwell’s Demon came out, I had to buy another copy and get it read, this time at a more leisurely, deadline-free pace.

Of course, that was so long ago now that I’m struggling with the promised review. Maybe some large, conceptual predator, swimming in the intertextual space between words, has chewed out the relevant info.

Or maybe I shouldn’t drink quite as much.

So, he says, launching a discourse marker into the murky waters, on with the précis, and our protagonist awakes as many have done since the days of Fighting Fantasy’s Creature of Havoc, with little memory of who or where he is. So far so trope-y. Of course, he finds a letter from himself explaining things up to a point, and directing him to his psychologist, Dr Randle, from whom he learns this has happened before and it’s due to the death of his girlfriend Clio. Dr Randle also says to leave off with the reading of letters from his past self, but, again, of course he doesn’t.

Before too long, he’s sitting in his house, a virtual cipher, with four Dictaphones in the corners, playing in a loop to create a non-divergent conceptual loop around him. Why?

Because of the Ludovician.

The Ludovician, and bear with me here, is the afore-mentioned conceptual predator, a thought-shark, and it’s got a taste for Eric Sanderson. Driven by a hunger to consume memories and identity, it pursues its victims through the streams of information that flow from and are generated by their interactions in the world. After a very near miss, Eric is forced into action, meeting in no particular order the dangerous Mr Nobody, Dr Trey Fidorius, conceptual oceanographer, and the mysterious and beautiful (and familiar?) Scout who reveals the existence of the villainous Mycroft Ward. And by this time, Eric has decided he needs to go shark-hunting.

As you can imagine, this appealed to me greatly as a pseudo-literary type pseudo-interested in all things outré and avant-garde-ly post-modern, even those I couldn’t understand at the time. It’s only on the re-reading however that I noticed that the big action scene at the end totally ripped off 1975’s Jaws almost to the smallest detail, not to spoil your enjoyment or anything, but I was surprised I’d not picked this up. In any event, I don’t think either Peter Benchley or Steven Spielberg will mind, as it’s so very clearly signposted – again, madness that I missed it on first reading – and so gleefully delivered. In fact, glee seems to underpin the whole book, seeping out through the peril and suspense, through the undergraduate-level referential pastiches, which means you can’t possibly mind that you’re partaking in an absurdist intellectual fiction. I’d go so far as to say The Raw Shark Texts – and I haven’t even mentioned the deliberate pun in the title – with all the joy of a flip-book shark section and unconventional formatting, is a ton of fun.

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