Many books take us to another world. Alice took us to Wonderland. Dorothy took us to Oz. But what about a book that takes us to a world inside our own? A world that has always been there that is not visible to the untrained eye. That’s exactly where Steven Hall takes us in his book “The Raw Shark Texts.”
Currently being adapted into a feature film by Blueprint Pictures, “The Raw Shark Texts” is a verbally stirring novel about one man searching to find himself among faded memories and unfamiliar faces. Acclaimed writer Mark Haddon calls it, “the bastard love-child of ‘The Matrix,’ ‘Jaws’ and ‘The Da Vinci Code.'”
We meet the main character, Eric Sanderson, as he wakes up on the floor of a living room in a house he doesn’t recognize, in clothes he doesn’t remember wearing with no notion of his name or identity.
As Eric is on the verge of befuddlement, anxiety and what he believes to be mental insanity, he pulls out his driver’s license. “Eric Sanderson. When I heard myself speak it, the name sounded solid and real and good and normal. It wasn’t. It was a ruin of loose masonry, broken windows and flapping blue tarpaulin.” He then finds a note on his entryway table that says to contact a Dr. Randle.
Our second main character, Dr. Randle, is the typical psychologist, the perfect ode to the density of this novel. She informs Eric that he has a “disassociate personality disorder” and that this is the 11th time he has come to see her with his memory completely dismantled. She also informs him that he once had a lover, named Clio, who had a terrible accident while the two of them were on vacation in Greece and lost her life.
The reader often grows fond of Dr. Randle as she helps Eric peddle his way through mass darkness to self-discovery, but we mustn’t be fooled. When Eric starts receiving packages from his former self, Dr. Randle outright denies him access to all of his previous thoughts and letters.
What Eric doesn’t know, and what Dr. Randle fails to admit, is that his memory is being eaten by a Ludovician shark, the largest of all conceptual fish. What we come to learn through letters from “the first Eric Sanderson” is that there are a whole species of conceptual fish that flow in the river of linguistics of everyday conversation and “feed on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self.”
From this point on, we follow Eric in his yellow jeep on a journey all over England (from Hull, Leeds, Sheffield, Manchester and Blackpool) to find himself and the love he once lost. With help from his friendly and coincidental guide, Scout, Eric travels successfully through “Un-space,” a safe haven for those studying conceptual fish, to find the doctor who could possibly help restore Eric’s memory and kill the Ludovician.
Will Eric ever know the first Eric Sanderson? Can he escape the jaws of his conceptual predator? Will Eric ever find love again? One fish, two fish, red fish…conceptual fish?
