As a metaphor for struggling against inner-demons, man battling the beasts of the deep is far from new. From Moby Dick, through to Hemmingway’s Old Man and the Sea a fish has always been far from simply being a fish. The instinctive menace of fighting a creature that, whilst closing in on you, remains submerged from view lends itself perfectly to the idea of battling the darker regions of the soul. It takes a brave new writer, then, to take on the theme of a shark hunt hoping to do something different. Steven Hall takes up the challenge with gusto in The Raw Shark Texts, taking that elemental conflict between man and shark to a surprisingly new place – dry land.
Much of the success of this novel lies in its conceptual basis, and as such it limits what one can say about the plot. Suffice to say that the protagonist of the novel awakes at the start of the novel having lost his memory, traumatised by some dreadful accident that has taken the life of his girlfriend, over three years ago. While trying to recover his memory, and some sense of what happened, he finds himself both the hunter and hunted.
There maybe just a touch of Memento, the film, lurking in such a start, but cultural references float in and out of the narrative with gentle ease, like currents ever-ready to knock you off course, or carry you onwards. Amongst the driftwood are The Wizard of Oz, Casablanca, Borges, and Paul Auster, but there’s also, obviously a continuous echo of Jaws throughout. Then again, mention the word shark, and you can bet that many people will automatically have a Spielberg image, accompanied by the obligatory soundtrack, surfacing in their mind’s eye. This is acknowledged briefly in the book, when describing the Shark hunting boat that Sanderson ends up on: “It should be familiar. If you were to say shark-hunting boat to almost anybody in the western world they’ll visualise this exact same boat”. For the most part this film short-hand is used sparingly and with skill, though the association of one character with Michael Caine, more than once, had me silently fuming. Once you put so blatant a face on a character, it’s impossible to shake off, and in this case it struck me as a lazy way of establishing a character.
And therein lies the fundamental problem with this otherwise brilliant book. So willing to experiment is the author (Laurence Sterne would recognise and enjoy a lot in this book), that almost inevitably he occasionaly puts his foot wrong, and puts in a sentence that just doesn’t seem to fit. Hall creates a world that has its own peculiar laws of physics, laws that have obviously been rigorously stress tested for coherence by the author, but it seems as if, at times, the effort of testing the internal logic of the plot has muffled his ears somewhat. A case in point is the title, which read out load a couple of times unfolds itself into the glaringly obvious – which ultimately does the book no favours.
Quibbles aside, there’s a daring and bright imagination shining through in this book. Mark Haddon, author of The Curious Incident of the Dog around Midnight, speaking about Hall’s book said it’s like “the bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws, and The Da Vinci Code”, which is pretty much spot on. It is also a deeply affecting story about memory, love, and death. When Sanderson finally recovers the truth about what happend to his girlfriend, Clio, Hall’s timing and language takes the breath away – like a punch in the stomach.
The Raw Shark Texts