The Raw Shark Texts - Steven Hall

A man wakes up on the floor of his home with no memory of who he is or what has happened to him. All he has left of his previous life is an angry-looking ginger tom called Ian. He finds out that his name is Eric Sanderson and that his problems began when his girlfriend Clio died in an accident three years ago. Letters and parcels arrive from “The First Eric Sanderson” which explain that his memories have been eaten by a conceptual shark called The Ludovician.

When I was a little girl, someone at school told me about the film Jaws, and this gave me nightmares about a sort of shark which could swim through floors, with its dorsal fin sticking out of the carpet. I've revisited those nightmares in this book as Eric tries to find a way to destroy The Ludovician before it eats the rest of his mind. As the Ludovician is a conceptual fish, sometimes only its fin pokes through into reality. Scary...

One of my favourite sections of the book is when the First Eric Sanderson explains to the second how he allowed the Ludovician out into the world from the bottom a pit in un-space:

Down at the bottom there was a place filled with was rows and rows of stinking neglected fish tanks with sick, dead and dying fish; a horrible abandoned aquarium.

Reading those words took me back instantly to the aquarium underneath Blackpool Tower. It probably wasn't as nightmarish in reality as it seems in my memory (I was very small when I went there) but I can't help thinking that Mr Hall might have been.

This was a strange, enjoyable and unashamedly clever book. It seems to have a target audience of people who enjoy both Jaws and Borges. I think some readers are likely to be annoyed by the typographic tricks. For example, in places the words are laid out to form the shape of a shark or a remora and part of the novel works as a flick book – I thought that was quite smart though.

Read it, read it, read it. If you don't I will come round your house with my copy and stand over you until you do.

You can watch the Ludovician sneaking up on The Second Eric Sanderson through his telly on the video below. Have a cushion ready to hide behind...

What are the scores, Jorge Borge?

This month I have mostly been reading "Labyrinths" by Jorge Luis Borges.

Apparently, Mr Borges writes “metafiction”so the first thing I had to do was look up what the hell that was. I also looked up “symbolism” as that was allegedly a big influence. Having read the definition of symbolism, I felt no wiser as to what it actually was so I just had to get on with reading the book in continuing ignorance.

The book is collection of short stories and essays. The stories are short, but at the same time immensely dense, referencing any number of other pieces of fiction inside them. This is really, really confusing as Borges’ fiction also makes liberal use of describing books that don’t exist, false biographies and deliberately false attributions. I end up feeling that I must have guessed wrong at least once about which bits were fact and where the words have come from, therefore I have been proven to be as daft and ignorant as all those people who thought Ghostwatch was a genuine documentary. Not only that, but the subject matter takes in big philosophical questions about such things as identity, free will, consciousness and reality. And the words are really hard.

My mind is pretty much blown.

Much like the film Primer, I have enjoyed Borges, and I’d recommend him, but I can’t honest claim to have understood the half of these stories. I liked the “Library of Babel” which struck me as much like the internet in that it contains everything you might ever want to know hidden amongst tides of lies and crap. I also liked the story about the magician who dreams a man into existence. This was easier going for someone who spent their youth with PKD!

How many words did I have to look up? LOTS!

Cosmogony – The study of the origin of the universe

Numina - Plural of “numen” which means a presiding divinity or spirit of a place; Creative energy; genius.

Verisimilar – having the appearance of truth; probable

Apodictic - Necessarily or demonstrably true; incontrovertible

Tetrach - A provincial ruler or vassal king who owed allegiance to the Roman Empire.

Nitid – bright, lustrous.

Teleology – I wish this meant the study of television, but alas it does not. Apparently it is the belief that everything has an ultimate, original cause and the search for evidence of design in nature. Sounds like a cross between a child recursively asking “Why?” and the endlessly moronic “intelligent design” doctrine. The study of this ology looks like a waste of neurons. I am cross that such a word even exists. Why not join with me in deliberately misusing it to mean “The study of television”? Eventually, the meaning will change!

Pullulate – to send out shoots, to breed or multiply, to swarm or teem.

Panegyric – an elaborate formal compliment.

Borges is another person who is done no favours at all by the modern desire for photos of the author. He was obviously scarily intellectual, but looks like a cross between a basset hound and a Galapagos tortoise.