The Raw Shark Texts

by Steven Hall, 2007
428pp
06/26/07 - 07/02/07

I remember being keenly interested in this book after hearing it reviewed on some lesser NPR program (On Point, maybe?). I don't recall exactly what the critic said about the book; she may have described conceptual monster fish inhabiting thought-space, she probably mentioned the thirty page flipbook that is the climax. In any event, I got the distinct impression that I, who enjoy Grant Morrison comics and Don Barthelme's collage/stories from the sixties, would like this book. Incidentally, were you pick up the book in a store and read its dust jacket blurbs, you'd likely come away thinking of the 2000 gimmick-film Memento, which is a horribly inaccurate first impression.

The book is gimmicky, though, which can be okay sometimes. Hall likes to play games with typography--sentences are blurred and distorted, images are formed from text as in concrete poetry:

All this to serve a wild premise, something like The Meme Machine by way of Philip K. Dick: the narrator is the victim of an attack by a Ludovician, a "conceptual shark" (pictured above). If we understand the shared ideas and flow of communication among human minds to be the "waters" of human culture--the recurring use of watery images is one of the book's nicer touches--then those fertile rivers and oceans have given rise to new forms of "aquatic" life, from purely conceptual fish, up to the Ludovician, thought-nature's greatest predator, who has eaten most of the narrator's personality and left him an amnesiac blank slate. This and a handful of other great quirky ideas--personalities spanning multiple bodies, "live" texts, "chemical prosthetics" for damaged personalities, and, not least of all, Un-Space--would seem to make for a great, weird romp. Call it sci-fi, if you have to.

Disappointingly, though, this book is a fast-paced thriller. Complete with explosions, a motorcycle chase, thin characters, forced sexual tension, and a nefarious villain. Oh, how I wish I could have just read a book about a dude pursued by a thought shark, with all the head-trips that implies, without having to read about people running away from people, Da Vinci Code-style. The thrilling conclusion can stay, just leave out all other thrilling parts. Not that the book was bad, it's just that I wish I could have taken it more seriously, and I(and I suspect I'm in the majority here, at least in the majority of people who matter) have a really tough time taking an action-driven thriller seriously.


Also, I would have preferred a different title. I liked that particular pun better when it was used in The Watchmen.