Bookworms: The Raw Shark Texts (2008) by Steven Hall

Enter Steven Hall’s thrillingworld of Un-Space and conceptual reality through the wandering, brooding adventure of Eric Sanderson as he struggles against his dissociative fugue, a memory-eating shark, and really his own lack of character, in The Raw Shark Texts.

The tale opens on a man who has no memory of his life and follows this Eric Sanderson into the world of conceptual reality while he struggles to understand what his first self was doing involved with a recently deceased girlfriend, conceptual fish galore, and the Un-Space Exploration Committee.  A slow unfolding of clues, twists, and turns, leads to adventures in words, letters, codes, feedback loops, and textual sharks creeping forward as you turn each page.

Steven Hall utilizes text not only to tell Eric’s fairly pitiful story, he also uses it to illustrate the tale as well as flesh out the unreal world that both inspires and haunts the main character and his travel companions.  This aspect really makes the story unique and helps to redeem the sections that sometimes feel forced, drawn out and out of place, most particularly those areas detailing Eric’s character and his relationships.

The relationship between our, supposed and uninspiring, hero Eric and his travel companion Scout, who may or may not be a woman from his past, highlights the books predominant flaw in the face of creative innovation.  These characters’ descriptions, thoughts and actions exemplify just how much this book is a story about words and about a conceptual world, and how little it is a story about the humans traversing that world.  Though I was enthralled with learning about the world, the Ludovician and the power of words, I cringed at the forced connections between characters and the rather mundane stereotypes forced upon them.

While there is some debate as to the effectiveness and practicality of Hall’s explanations in regards to fighting the Ludovician, I found myself accepting the terms.  This mostly because I felt I was entering into his world, where the rules simply were what they were, I mean, what do I know about Un-Space right?  Much like every author or creator takes liberties in characterizations of vampires and zombies to fit their own perspective, I felt Steven Hall wrote a conceptual world that was his own simply for the fact that he created it.

There has been talk of a movie in the works centered on this book, with nothing but an unproduced screenplay by Simon Beaufoy (Slumdog Millionaire) coming of those rumors as of yet.

The Raw Shark Texts will be to you just exactly what you make of it; much like the Rorschach inkblot tests the story implies it is named after.  If you have it in you to accept the world that Steven Hall has created simply for what it is, and are willing to traverse the roller coaster of a tale that is the pursuit and battle against the Ludovician, The Raw Shark Texts is a perfect tale to capture your imagination, quizzical mind, and hunger for a psychological thrill ride.