As with William Gibson, author Steven Hall uses the communications revolution to play with new story ideas. Unfortunately, Hall is no Gibson and his writing is not a patch on the conceptual brilliance and terse noir style of the sci-fi master who has delivered genre-busting books Neuromancer (1984) and Pattern Recognition (2003).
Yet despite being a hideously cliched and limited writer, Hall is a surprisingly talented pattern-maker. He has an impressive ability to make narrative devices connect. And therein lies the book's appeal as an inter-textual pulp thriller for the online generation.
Not to mention any studio that may wish to boil down The Raw Shark Texts into a script that does away with the turgid writing and puts the focus back on Hall's inventive plotting and startling knack for images.
The Raw Shark Texts inhabits the same conceptual universe as the film The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
The Eternal Sunshine is one of many homages Hall pays. The Raw Shark Texts also engages Christopher Nolan's Memento, Paul Auster's detective fiction, The Matrix, Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves and, inevitably, Jaws. This last reference plays out in the novel's long climax: a literal re-enactment of the film, in which Sanderson and Scout come face to face with the shark-made-of-words.
The Raw Shark Texts is not cynical and knowing, nor is it fully in control of its own trickery. But that's precisely its charm - charm that made it the star of the 2006 London Book Fair, made Hollywood studios compete to acquire it and made 25 foreign countries rush to buy translation rights before it was even published.
When all's said and done, the memory-eating shark was a killer idea, fearlessly pulled off, and Steven Hall deserves his new-found status as a Big Fish.
