The raw shark texts

One morning as Eric Sanderson awoke from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into himself. Except he doesn't remember the uneasy dreams. He doesn't remember himself. He's got more or less complete amnesia (think Eco's The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana - he's forgotten everything about himself, but every piece of historical and pop-cultural trivia, every turn of phrase, every cultural meme is still there). He's a blank slate. Except for the letters his old self keeps sending him, warning him of a conceptual shark - the idea of a predator, lurking in the stream of information surrounding all human interaction, and feeding on memories. The ultimate representation of self-destructive thoughts.

You'd think the best thing that could have happened to Eric - the new Eric, Eric II - would have been if Eric I had never told him about this, because once he knows, the shark is after him too. And so he has to set out on a quest to find himself - literally and figuratively, in both the subterranean and subtextual world under the consensus of what life in 21st century Britain is like. (Possibly, he's mad and it's all in his head. Possibly, the shark is very real. Possibly, both; after all, if you have an idea in your head, then that idea is real - the only reality there is, perhaps?)

It's difficult to explain, but it's really a quite clever idea, weaving in themes about language, subjective construction of reality, memetic mutation and evolution, dealing with grief, and a bunch of stuff that might have fit well in a Paul Auster or Haruki Murakami story (unsurprisingly, Hall namedrops both, along with Borges and other metafictional superstars). He's not quite the writer it takes to say anything truly profound about it, and rather than a new Kafka On The Shore it ends up more as a mixture of Snow Crash and Neverwhere with some unfortunate overtones of the Big Purple Dan Brown Book Which Shall Not Be Named. But hey, I really like two of those, and as metaphysical thrillers go it's entertaining. I'll put up with some clunky prose if it serves an original idea, and for a long while it does.

So I'm coasting along merrily on the streams of consciousness - not stream-of-consciousness - in Eric's wake until I hit the last 120 pages. Which, without giving away any details, are anything but original. In fact, I've both read and seen them. As in literally scene by scene, word for word. I get the point of it, but there's using pop culture references to make a point and there's outright plagiarism, and the fact that the characters acknowledge the original in the text while playing it out only makes it all the more stupid, and the book sinks like a stone.

Beach closed.