THE RAW SHARK TEXTS by Steven Hall

Canongate, £12.99

THE BUZZ AROUND Steven Hall’s debut, The Raw Shark Texts,is deafening. Nicole Kidman is said to want him to change the sex of the hero so that she can play him, The New York Times is to follow his publicity tour and the book has been sold in 23 countries.

The publicity may be all sound and fury, but the book is a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. It attempts to tell the story of one Eric Sanderson as he tries to piece together his memories, having become afflicted with a rare mental illness after the death of his girlfriend. The ailment takes the form of a “Ludovi-cian”, “one of the many species of purely conceptual fish which swim in the flows of human interaction and the tides of cause and effect”; it is a predatory shark that “feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self . . .”.

The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

This book is searingly hip and much hyped, but is it any good? Alice Fordham reviews the reviews

• Thanks for the memories

• A stench of rotten fish

• Paperback: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Related Links

• Paperback: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

• The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

• Thanks for the memories

At one moment the prose is in the overdrive of “tear-wet frustration” and “shudder-hack-ing violence”, at another, it is pure creative writing school syndrome: “A vague physical memory of the actuality of the floor survived but now I was bobbing and floating and trying to tread water in the idea of the floor, in fluid liquid concept, in its endless cold rolling waves of association and history.” Ah, the fluid liquid concept.

Hall really wants to be the new David Mitchell, a writer who can give an unforgettable voice to, say, a floating quantum thought particle, but has neither his searing intelligence nor his ability. 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.

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