THE AMNESIAC by Sam Taylor
Faber £12.99

THE RAW SHARK TEXTS by Steven Hall
Canongate £12.99

Oddly, here come two novels, by hip and happening thirty-ish British writers, about post-traumatic amnesia. Of course, amnesia the plot device has little bearing on amnesia the medical condition. Sam Taylor and Steve Hall both employ it in the stock form familiar from Hitchcock’s Spellbound — the great gaping blank of which the sufferer is nevertheless fully aware. This is handy because it poses an instant mystery. More often, in reality, either you know what happened but just can’t picture it, or you have no idea there is a gap in the record at all.

Taylor’s hero James Purdew has forgotten his university years. He knows this, but his diaries are in a small portable safe, for which he has lost the key. The opening sequence, set in a heat wave in Amsterdam where James is living with his Dutch girlfriend, is evocative and highly satisfactory. Once James breaks up with the girlfriend, sails to “the city of H” — Hull, basically — where he was a student, and sets about solving the mystery, it all becomes rather annoying.

There is an involved homage to Borges, an inserted Victorian crime story, other selves, parallel lives and a certain amount of recourse to the words “labyrinth” and “palimpsest”. (Yup, ’fraid so.) Graduate readers who are about the same age as Taylor will no doubt like the vibe, but the novel’s essential thesis, that all memory is a delusion, is misguided and is, in fact, a fairly common form of the psychological avoidance strategy known as denial. If you ever experience the breakdown of amnesia in the shock of total recall — what old soldiers call “the flashbacks” — you know it’s all in there somewhere, in perfect and appalling detail.

Instead of a locked safe, Steven Hall’s hero Eric Sanderson encounters a locked room in his house. He has no memory of his past life at all. A doctor tells him he has been like this on and off for three years, since his girlfriend drowned on holiday in Greece. A bit of the holiday, but not the key bit, is described in a manuscript sent by his old self from, apparently, another dimension.

Again, after an intriguing realistic start, the thing goes weird. Hall gives more rationale than Taylor. The story is not real, Eric goes into a fugue state and most of it is in his head. Again Hall quotes and admires Borges, but the bigger influence is Haruki Murakami. The novel really amounts to pastiche Murakami. This makes it zippier, sexier and more colourful than the Taylor, but also more sentimental.

Eric is being pursued by a Ludovician, a “conceptual shark” that feeds on memories. (Eric’s obsession with fish is explained at the end.) He is also in trouble with “the Ward-thing”, a collective entity created by a Victorian gent called Ward who sought immortality by transferring his personality to others. With the internet, it’s all got out of hand and far too many people are turning into Ward.

Escaping from a Ward agent, Eric hops on a motorbike with sexy mystery-girl Scout, an antiWard agent, but he sees the Ludovician in pursuit, its submerged form making a wave in the ground. “Less than 50 yards behind us and keeping pace, ideas, thoughts, story shards, dreams, memories were blasting free of the grass in a high-speed spray.”

Later, the shark, its image made of letters, comes swimming at the reader in a 50-page, flick-book animation. Clever. The whole novel is clever, exciting, funny (a cat called Ian, for instance — I don’t know why that’s so funny, but it is) and, finally, moving. Very, very pleased with itself, though.

Available at Sunday Times Books First prices of £11.69 each (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

Times Recommends

• Superfreakonomics by Steven D Levitt and Stephen J Dubner
• The Times picks the 50 best paperbacks of 2009
• Vincent van Gogh’s letters show the soul of the artist