Postmodern Jaws

A monster that devours words and concepts is hunting for Eric Sanderson's mind.

THE RAW SHARK TEXTS

By Steven Hall

Canongate. 428 pp. $24

The star of Steven Hall's rousingly inventive The Raw Shark Texts is its villain -- always a good sign in a thriller. Raymond Chandler famously said, "When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand." Hall one-ups Chandler by sending in a shark. But not just any shark, a conceptual shark called a Ludovician, which swims in a current of words and ideas and feeds on memory and sense of self. Every time the Ludovician makes an appearance, Hall's novel jolts to life.

Eric Sanderson gasps awake one day to find his memory missing. As Eric struggles to forge a bland and static life, a series of letters, apparently from his self before the memory loss, the so-called First Eric, warns him of the conceptual shark that, with a vengeance as unmotivated as Iago's, is determined to eat Eric's memory over and over. "Life is tenacious and determined," explains First Eric. "The streams, currents and rivers of human knowledge, experience and communication which have grown throughout our short history are now a vast, rich and bountiful environment. Why should we expect these flows to be sterile?"

Second Eric doesn't buy it until he spies the figure of a shark within the white noise of his television. In the first of a series of text pictures that make the book so engaging, Hall shows the Ludovician as it gets closer and closer until it is nothing but a great unblinking eye. And then it attacks.

It isn't long before Eric is on the run, dodging the memory eater and searching for the strange Dr. Fidorous, who might just be able to get the damn shark off his tail. At this point the novel takes on the cloak of your typical thriller: a man on the run, aided by a great-looking waif with a killer smile and a bomb in her pocket. Oh, yeah, and there's a cat. Employing Second Eric's point of view, the main narrative voice is not especially compelling. If the author's goal was to show how integral recollections are to personality, he succeeded. More compelling are the journals written by First Eric, the raw texts of the title, that give glimpses of Eric's romance with Clio, the love of his life, who was killed in a tragic accident off the coast of Greece.

Hall, an artist and first-time novelist from Derbyshire, England, is exploring questions of memory and grief here -- how memory deals as much with the future as with the past, how grief can cause memory to freeze, or even seize up -- and he does so rather deftly. But his real achievement is to create a bizarre and sinister world where language and ideas exist like a stream of nutrients, spawning predators and parasites, such as the one that slips one night from a malevolent letter into Eric's body. "It was small -- maybe nine inches, maybe the length of a worry that doesn't quite wake you in your sleep. . . . The creature had a round sucker-like mouth lined with dozens of sharp little doubts and inadequacies."

Though much of this meta-territory has already been mapped by writers such as Jasper Fforde in his police procedurals, where the cops slip in and out of classic literary works, and Tom Grimes in his epic tale of information sickness, WILL@epicqwest.com, it can still be dangerous ground. Nothing kicks a reader out of a story faster than an author playing meta-games just because he can. But even as Hall takes great delight in showing off the details of his world with all kinds of loopy names and textual tricks -- including one terrific visual sequence where the terrifying nature of the shark is made real -- his methods almost always serve the purpose of the story. And for a first novelist, Hall has a nice way of hiding telling details until the end of a sentence or a scene, like the stinger at the end of a scorpion's tail.

It's all a lot of fun, yet there is also a surprising emotional resonance in seeing Second Eric, like Beckett's Krapp with his tapes, reading and rereading First Eric's journals as he obsesses over the experiences that the Ludovician has chomped out of his head. And to hear Second Eric's voice take on the snap of his predecessor's is especially satisfying.

Best of all, there is the shark itself, wily and relentless, with its chilling eye and gaping maw, hungry for memory. Hall has created a nightmare creature, engorged on humanity's unquenchable urge to express itself. "Less than fifty yards behind us and keeping pace, ideas, thoughts, fragments, story shards, dreams, memories were blasting free of the grass in a high-speed spray. As I watched, the spray intensified. The concept of the grass itself began to lift and bow wave into a long tumbling V. At the crest of the wave, something was coming up through the foam -- a curved and rising signifier, a perfectly evolved idea fin."

Yikes. ·

Tyler Knox is the author of the novel "Kockroach."