Review: The Raw Shark Texts

Steven Hall, The Raw Shark Texts, Canongate/The Text Publishing Company, Melbourne Vic., 2008.

Octavo; paperback; 440pp., with many monochrome illustrations. Mild wear; text block and page edges toned with some spotting. Very good.

Some years ago now, I encountered a book entitled The House of Leaves which left me simultaneously excited and infuriated, mostly the latter. The book is vapid and trite, signifying nothing other than a waste of time on the reader’s part. And yet, there was such a clamouring by the public for it, amounting to online discussions and websites tracking the various ramifications of the text. Most galling was the author’s assertions, along with statements by others firmly under his spell, that nothing like this had ever been done before and that he was breaking new ground. This is plainly not the case, as anyone with a reasonable grasp on the history of Western literature will point out and was underscored by the blatant ripping-off of Voltaire’s famous dedication (cunningly translated from the French) at the start of the piece. Why do people think that the past is ripe for plundering and appropriation when there are more than enough people out there who will call them on it?

Playing with the typographic components of the written piece is an exercise that is almost as old as books themselves. Breaking the narrative into artificial constraints in order to explore metatextual elements of the prose, ditto. As Santayana declared, those who are willing to forget the past are those who will be ostentatiously delighted by its repetition and will suffer the acute derision of those not so willing to ditch precedent. People who first encounter these kinds of texts are often surprised and excited by the opening of new vistas of reading discovery – that’s fine. Those who prey on such readers, on the other hand, deserve to be called out.

Let’s take a trip through history, shall we?

In medieval times, books were written by hand, by monks in scriptoria, who also decorated the borders and other textual elements of the works that they were transcribing. Hidden within marginal illustrations were pictorial commentaries on the characters of those who were paying for these books for their libraries, or other notable figures of the day. Sometimes these illustrations were pithy barbs; others were more a reflection of the illustrator’s state of mind (hungry; bored) or their own views on the text’s issues. The high tone of a religious tract could be devastatingly undercut by the appearance within an illuminated capital of a symbolic creature at variance with the work’s theme: a Fox for example could underscore a scheming intent; a Wolf, an intemperate greediness; a Hedgehog could signify a sodomite…

The texts themselves could be broken up into a symbolic framework that would not only sell the narrative but would highlight the characters and themes within each section. The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer has such a structure, as does The Decameron by Boccaccio, and A Dream of Red Mansions by Cao Xuequin, to use a non-Western example. Creating such a structure allows the reader to anticipate the text’s arc and engages the reader more fully with the plot. Even de Sade did this with 120 days of Sodom, as did J.G. Ballard in his Atrocity Exhibition.

Using typography to sell content is not just the preserve of medieval scribes either. The Life and Times of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman by Laurence Sterne, written from 1759 to 1767, makes use of marbled paper and other visual, non-textual elements to get its point across. At one point feeling less than buoyant, our titular hero reveals his thoughts with nothing more than a blacked-out page; Stephenie Meyers used a similar device in the first Twilight novel by allowing a blank page to speak to the state of her heroine’s depression. This kind of typographical and textual playfulness – and many other examples like it – have been around for ages. Lewis Carroll anyone?

The thing that made House of Leaves so exasperating, having emulated all of these tropes and notions, was its author’s and audience’s wild claims to have done something new and extraordinary – along with copying T.S. Eliot’s footnoting fetish and the nested epistolary format common to most Victorian writing, including Dracula, Frankenstein and The Beetle – when it’s clear that it was the farthest thing from the truth. The whole exercise was an example of the creators trying to look smug and clever, rather than having anything vital and of interest to say. Unlike say, Iain Pears’ An Instance of the Fingerpost, or Arturo Perez-Reverte’s The Dumas Club or Italo Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies. Above all, it’s simply not fun – not even remotely entertaining – to read.

You’ll understand then, when I say that I was extremely cautious about picking up The Raw Shark Texts.

This book was so far off my radar that I only encountered it while shelving stock at work. I grinned at the cover – riffing off the “Jaws” marketing material – then I dropped it, and, when picking it back up, I noticed that there seemed to be some pictorial material within the text. Then I discovered the whole ‘flip-book-shark-attack’ sequence in the back and decided that I needed to take this volume home for further inspection. I’m glad that I did.

Pictorial content there is between these covers, but – pleasingly – it’s all in context with the work at hand and serves a definite purpose within and without the text. To boil things down, this is a book about a fellow who is being pursued by a metatextual shark called a “Ludovician”, which patrols the liminal ‘waters’ between symbolic and literal reality, seeking prey. We’ll get back to this in a minute. Suffice it to say, that at several points in the narrative the shark breaches the barrier between reality and textuality, and these are represented by typographical pictures of a shark erupting out of the page. At one point while the protagonist is submerged in extra-liminal space, this is represented by a flipbook showing the fish emerging from the distant haze and barrelling down upon its potential victim, jaws agape. At no point do these cross-textual images seem gratuitous and they really add to the suspense and enjoyment of reading the book.

Getting back to the subject matter: yes, this is a book about a guy being stalked by a notional shark that wants to devour his memories. We start the book with Eric Sanderson waking up in his flat having just survived (although he doesn’t remember it) an almost fatal encounter with the Ludovician. By means of a series of letters and notes sent to him by his previous (pre-attack) incarnation (whom he refers to as the First Eric Sanderson) and the attentions of a self-interested psychologist who believes Eric is suffering from a rare dissociative disorder, he attempts to re-start his life, a PTSD survivor who doesn’t know what he’s recovering from.

Various breadcrumbs from his past existence – a videotape of a lightbulb in a dark room turning on and off in suggestive sequences; postcards from a holiday on Naxos; a returning cat named Ian that seems to know Eric of old – put him on a trail to discover an almost legendary etymologist named Trey Fidorous who might know the answers to Eric’s dilemma. Along the way he is reminded of a past doomed love affair with a deceased soulmate, and he encounters another metatextual survivor on the run from her own demon, a young woman named Scout.

The first part of the book – the set-up – feels a lot like Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere, in its fascination for forgotten and abandoned urban environments and obsession with homeless individuals and their methods of coping with their lot. It rides the rails of the urban fantasy genre pretty firmly, but without the ghoulishness or self-absolution present in most works of that ilk: surprisingly, most homeless people don’t actually have magical places that they can retire to for food and shelter when night falls, believe it or not. At the, roughly, halfway point of the narrative the gears shift, and the story takes a different turn.

If you’ve seen the movie “Jaws” by Steven Spielberg, then you’ve experienced what happens to our heroes at the tail end of this novel. In the movie, the third act involves three characters who set out to sea, hunting the shark, on a clapped-out old trawler named “Orca”. They establish a tense hierarchy of command; they rail against each other’s abilities and experience; they suffer a few frightening moments that force them to work together; the nominal leader proves to have hopelessly miscalculated his opponent; another character vanishes during a shark encounter, appearing to have been eaten; and the last character finally wins the day by sheer luck and grit. Well – SPOILER ALERT – this is exactly how the back end of this novel pans out, too. Our heroes build a nominal shark-boat according to consensual readership expectations (i.e., what a notional audience would expect them to build, based upon a cultural awareness of both the movie and Peter Benchley's novel) and then they run out this ‘shark-movie playbook’ to win through.

Now, this might seem like a bit of a cop-out, but there’s a metatextual layer to this process that requires that these events take place, and which is supported by the narrative. That’s fine – we’ve been set up to expect it. However, on an entertainment level, that doesn’t mean that it isn’t a bit ‘ho-hum’ in its execution. Being told how a thing ends beforehand doesn’t win you any friends, no matter the excuse for doing it.

I stated above that other books of this sort have failed because they are just not entertaining. That’s not the case here. What we have is a solid mystery and quest novel of the urban fantasy variety, but what makes it even more engaging is the story of Eric’s doomed relationship with the dead Clio and his burgeoning new relationship with the efficient, no-nonsense Scout. This romantic sub-plot underscores the clever-clever technicality of the present dangers and gives the reader an excuse to plough on, quite apart from all the intellectual exercises of the book’s mind-games. And did I mention that Hall is just a beautiful writer? Well, there's that.

So, on the one hand, this is pretty clearly Neverwhere with a segue into "Jaws", but it’s also its own beast. The devil here is in the details. Learning about the strange symbolic world that Eric gets dropped into is a gripping and fascinating experience. The mystery resolves as his memory returns and the horrors which populate his sub-liminal, supra-/super-/sub-/meta-/extratextual nightmare are palpable and weird. I enjoyed the strangeness of it all, along with Hall’s ability to make it all seem credible and possible. And, did I mention, there’s a shark-attack flipbook too?!

Since the book’s release, there have been a lot of online shenanigans surrounding the work – missing segments and “un-chapters”; discussions of coding techniques used in the novel – This stuff, for me, is not necessary. I think of it as extraneous marketing or promotional material, for completists only. I’m not going to waste my time tracking it all down, but I’m sure others will enjoy doing so. In the meantime, Hall has penned another tricksy book and I’ve listed it below, along with another bunch of similar titles – with the exception of House of Leaves which is not worthy of the association – which fall under the umbrella of typographically experimental novels.

Three-and-a-half Tentacled Horrors from me.

*****

Other Typographically Twisty Texts:

Francesco Colonna, Hypnerotomachia Poliphili (1499)

Johannes Trithemius, Steganographia (1499)

"Torquemada" (Edward Powys Mathers), Cain's Jawbone (1934)

Marc Saporta, Composition No. I (1962)

Julio Cortazar, Hopscotch (1963; translated into English 1966)

Maurice Roche, Compact (1966; translated in 1988)

B.S. Johnson, The Unfortunates (1969)

Harry Matthews, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1972)

Christine Brooke-Rose, Thru (1975)

Alasdair Gray, 1982, Janine (1984)

J.J. Abrams & Doug Dorst, S (2013)

Amie Kaufman & Jay Kristoff, Illuminae (2015)

Rian Hughes, XX (2020)

Steven Hall, Maxwell’s Demon (2021)

Rian Hughes, The Black Locomotive (2021)