A Literary Mash-up

Posted 27 August, 2007 in Book Reviews |

The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall. HarperCollins, $34.95 cloth, 440 pp., ISBN: 978-0-00-200840-2.

Mash-up (a.k.a Bastard Pop): Bastard pop is a musical genre which, in its purest form, consists of the combination (usually by digital means) of the music from one song with the acapella from another. Typically, the music and vocals belong to completely different genres. At their best, bastard pop songs strive for musical epiphanies that add up to considerably more than the sum of their parts.

– Source: Google definitions

In the seventy-three years since Ezra Pound published his collection of essays urging poets to “make it new,” writers have been struggling mightily to adhere to his directive. Their labours have produced, among other things, the self-reflexiveness of modernism, the hyper-self-reflexiveness of postmodernism, and the über-self-reflexiveness metafiction. At their best (think: David Foster Wallace), these attempts have revivified a genre (novels) that has often seemed in danger of becoming almost irredeemably moribund. At their worst (think: Douglas Coupland), they have resulted in fiction that is so solipsistic and self-involved that their authors are at constant risk of actually physically disappearing into their own navels.

Thirty-two-year-old novelist Steven Hall cleaves closer to the first group than the second with his debut effort, The Raw Shark Texts, which is a strange and frequently beguiling mixture of genres and literary influences. Its story opens with a man waking up on his living room floor, unable to remember who or where he is. He discovers a note he has left for himself telling him that his name is Eric Sanderson and advising him to seek out a therapist named Dr. Randle, who informs him that he suffers from a condition known as “dissociative amnesia,” and that this is his eleventh relapse.

Eric responds to this news by hiding himself away in his house and rifling through old journals and letters left behind by “the First Eric Sanderson.” Perusing these materials, he learns that the woman he loved, Clio Aames, has died, and that he is being pursued by a Ludovician, a conceptual shark that feeds on thoughts and memories: “A Ludovician might select an individual human being as its prey animal and pursue and feed on that individual over the course of years, until that victim’s memory and identity have been completely consumed.”

Sanderson’s attempts to outrun the Ludovician lead him on a journey through un-space, which is hidden behind and beneath parking lots, derelict buildings, abandoned factories and warehouses. On his journey he meets Scout, who bears a striking resemblance to the departed Clio (they both have the same tattoo on their toes), and Dr. Trey Fidorous, who offers Sanderson a way of defeating the Ludovician by tricking it into consuming the persona of Mycroft Ward, who has found a way to cheat death by reproducing his essential self endlessly over the Internet.

Any précis of the novel’s plot is going to make it sound bizarre and unwieldy; it is a testament to Hall’s storytelling abilities that the plot elements never overwhelm the reader. Hall exerts complete control over his narrative and his story reads more like a breezy thriller than a dense piece of postmodern experimental fiction.

This has to do in large part with the inherent familiarity of the materials with which Hall is working in the novel.

Much has been made of The Raw Shark Texts’ originality. The review in the Independent (U.K.) said that it is “a novel that genuinely isn’t like anything you have ever read before.” The Irish Independent compared it to Ulysses, A Clockwork Orange, and Neuromancer: “those shockingly original works that make the reader look at the whole notion of the novel in a new way.” And Gerry Donaghy, writing on Powells.com, states, “I defy anybody out there to find a more original and audacious novel this year.”

But these fawning reviews largely miss the point, in my estimation. The Raw Shark Texts is only original in the sense that a musical mash-up is original: what it does is take various literary references and textual elements, tosses them together in a kind of literary Yahtzee shaker, and dumps them out again. The elements themselves have all been used before: the amnesiac protagonist is a familiar thriller trope, one employed notably in Ludlum’s The Bourne Identity; the notion of identity existing simultaneously in a bifurcated way across individuals is reminiscent of Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World; the collision of objective and subjective identity is a recurring theme in the work of Paul Auster; and the final chase in the novel — complete with a conceptual shark cage and a boat whose name, the Orpheus, is euphonically resonant of its literary predecessor — is virtually a scene-for-scene rewrite of the climactic sequence in Jaws.

Even the idiosyncratic text design is not sui generis: Mark Z. Danielewski used visual textual elements to much the same effect in his novel House of Leaves, and the flip-book that provides a graphic depiction of the final shark attack resembles the flip-book at the end of Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close.

The cleverness of The Raw Shark Texts lies not in the originality of its materials, but in the way that Hall has arranged these materials into a satisfying narrative. If Hall is blazing a trail, he is doing so by showing how familiar materials can be juxtaposed in a creative and interesting way. Donald Barthelme said that collage is the art form of the twentieth century. Steven Hall, himself a visual artist, proves with his debut novel that it is alive and well at the beginning of the twenty-first.

2 comments to “A Literary Mash-up”

Panic, August 28th, 2007 at 9:52 am:

• At their worst (think: Douglas Coupland)
  Hey now!! We’re going to have to come to blows soon, I think.
  Heh.

  I’ve had an ARC of The Raw Shark Texts sitting on my desk for months now. I suppose I should get around to it.

amy, August 30th, 2007 at 10:56 am:

• very interesting! i’ll have to check this book out.

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