The Raw Shark Texts
Steven Hall
427 pages
published in 2007
The Raw Shark Texts was marked as science fiction in my local library, which is why I glanced at it while browsing the fiction shelves. "Mindfuck" would be a better classification howeve, one of those books that break down the realities of your world and has you looking for monsters out of the corners of your eye. Reading it on a long, delayed train journey with nothing else to distract me while it was slowly getting dark helped a lot as well.
Steven Hall sucked me in from the first two sentences: "I was unconscious. I'd stopped breathing." I should quote the first three and a half pages to show how Steven Hall builds up the scene from there, as his hero wakes up in an explosion of coughs and deep breaths, takes stock of his situation and then realises he doesn't know where he is or who he is. He pats his pockets, locates a driver's licence and tastes the name it gives him: Eric Sanderson. The scene ends with that discovery, with a new scene opening in a therapist's sitting room, as she explains what's been happening to him. While she explains, flashbacks explains how Eric got there: going downstairs from the bedroom he awoke in, he found a letter by the telephone, a letter from "the first Eric Sanderson": who tells him to go to this therapist.
She tells him what has happened. A diving accident killed his girlfriend, a short while later he lost his memory. Then follows a new shock: that was three years ago and this is the eleventh recurrence. She tells him not to worry too much, he can re-establish his life through therapy, but impresses on him not to read any more letters the first Eric Sanderson might have send him as they would only confuse him. When he accidently does so anyway he decides not to say anything about it but not to read further letters either. He keeps recieving letters and packages and puts them aside until late one evening, something attacks him from his television. It's then he realises more is going on than just a weird form of memory fugue and in one letter he finds what's happening to him:
The animal hunting you is a Ludovican. It is an example of one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect. This may sound like madness, but it isn't. Life is tenacious and determined. The streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge, experience and communication which have grown throughout our short history aee now a vast, rich and bountiful environment. Why should we expect these flows to be sterile? [...] The Ludovician is a predator, a shark. It feeds on human memories and the instrinsic sense of self. Ludovicians are solitaey, fiercely territorial and methological hunters. A Ludovician might select an individual human being as its prey animal and pursue and feed on that individual ouver the course of years, until that victim's memory and identity have been completely consumed.
Isn't that a great concept, one of the neatest ideas I've read in a long time. Anyway, the letters and packages the first Eric Sanderson has sent were meant as survival guides to train the second Eric to elude the Ludovician long enough to locate and find the elusive dr Trey Fidorous, who knows more about the ecosystem found in human communication streams. He can only be reached through unspace, the places behind "employees only doors", anonymous crawlspaces, abandoned factory halls etc. Obviously he has to go on a quest to learn how to kill the great white shark...
But the first Eric Sanderson has given more to the second Eric. He has also given him memories of his time with his girlfriend in Greece, before her death, encoded in a light bulb flashing on and off in an empty room, in morse code. In response he starts dreaming of her as well. These memories and dreams are interwoven and interact with the main plot.
The climax and buildup to it are brilliantly realised and I won't spoil it here, but there is a coda as well which some people find undermines the whole point of the book. The thing with a mindfuck book like this is always the possibility that the writer will copout, make it all a dream or a delusion, but also whether it will get slightly too science fictional and loses that frisson of subliminal fear. If it's just another science fiction story it's safe; if it's just a delusion of the main character, what's the point? For the most part Steven Hall keeps the ambiguity in the background, keeping the story real but leaving the possibility in the back of your mind that it is all just a delusion -- the coda seems to confirm this possibility, but, but, but, again there remains still enough doubt to not have to believe this, which is how I like it.
Googling around preparing this review I found out Steven Hall is one of those modern writers, website and all, who just can't let his book go, so he has created a hidden, negative book and hidden it online: "For each chapter in The Raw Shark Texts there is, or will be, an un-chapter, a negative. If you look carefully at the novel you might be able to figure out why these un-chapters called negatives". The Raw Shark Texts doesn't really need this. This is a great novel anyway.