Well, Neel Mukherjee at The Times thought, on balance, that it wasn't: "We are left with only stratospheric pretentious-ness, where the writer's barely assimilated reading and capacity to invent empty tricks stalk the pages like ghosts.

The book shuttles between logorrhoea and a bagful of exhausted ideas - codes; empty pages; a shark created out of typeface; toe-curlingly pseud chapter-headings ("My Heart was Deep Space and My Head was Maths") but the overall impression is of a ludicrous conceit far beyond its malleability.

Nevertheless, this is an important cultural marker - of the triumph of the PR machine over that poor, passé little thing called writing."

Sam Leith from The Telegraph detects similar showmanship but has kinder things to say about it: "If this sounds like a load of cobblers, it is. But it is entertaining, inventive, amusing and stylishly narrated cobblers."

Thie "cobblers" theory was a recurring theme, even among the press that liked the book. Kirkus Press said: "Quite a narrative feat of hallucinatory imagination, though occasionally only borderline coherent." And Matt Thorne from The Independent said: "Hall takes his concept almost to breaking point, and the novel is constantly on the point of complete collapse both typographically and plot-wise."

But to some, this incoherence was as nothing compared with the consciousness-stretching excitement of the book as a whole. The Independent went on to say that: "every time it feels as if Hall has, in TV parlance, "jumped the shark" (sorry), he ups the stakes and pulls everything back together…The Raw Shark Texts is, for once, a novel that genuinely isn't like anything you have ever read before, and could be as big an inspiration to the next generation of writers as Auster and Murakami have been to Hall."

There was a thoughtful piece by Steven Poole in the New Statesman, now up on the blog Unspeak, which gave the book patience but couldn't wholeheartedly endorse it: "For sheer exuberance and invention, roughly crafted though it may be, The Raw Shark Texts is easily preferable to yet another fastidiously sensitive workshopped "literary" novel about growing up in the regions. But does it indicate that fiction is coming to accept a place subservient to film in people's imaginations? The anxiety of influence now keeps an obsessive eye fixed on the silver screen, and Hall, in his acknowledgments, even thanks the people who have already been working on the Ludovician's "celluloid cousin". Indeed, The Raw Shark Texts reads mainly like a novelisation, of a film yet to exist. The novelist is dead; long live the conceptual noveliser."

But what do the readers think? Kris, of Sparkles and Spit blog, said: "I have been reading an advance copy of The Raw Shark Texts. It's over...but it's not over. This is a book I know I'll be thinking about, talking about, and wondering about for a good while yet….I guess what I'm trying to say is you don't read this book--you experience it. Hall captures everything so beautifully. Starting with "My eyes slammed themselves capital O open" on the first page. The book is real and unreal." He also says that he "loved it".

Danuta Keane has also got hold of an advance copy, and is a fan: "A really imaginative novel that marries popular culture from Jaws to Donnie Darko with literary horror. Eric Sanderson wakes up and can't remember anything until he starts to get letters from himself sent before he blacked out. It seems it has happened before. And he is being hunted by a conceptual shark, one f a race of creatures. It is rare to read something this imaginative and well written, filmic and fun. Donnie Darko meets Memento. Fabulous."

It's only just been published, so it will be interesting to see what the other literary blogs make of it. If you've read it, love it or hate it, comment below and let us know what you think.

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