'The Raw Shark Texts' - Steven Hall

My two-word review of the Raw Shark Texts would be 'utterly compelling'. I could hardly call that impartial, however! I do regard this as one of the best novels I've read in some years, but it's not without its flaws.

The strength of the novel comes through its concept, one that explores the dangers lurking in our communications and the power of some media to enter or control our thoughts. Ironically, I feel it's a book where less communication about its content offers the reader a more rewarding experience, as they can be freshly surprised by the genius of Hall's intellectual creation as the story unfolds.

There are weaknesses in the execution, however. Dialogue, for example, can be trite, and particularly within the romantic sub-plot, it can become overly derivative. Perhaps the author is aware of that, as the key character acknowledges that he has remembered the conversations he recounts as cleverer than they were.

Hall's language skills are better employed in physical descriptions and tight scenes of drama and suspense. His language is both surreal and precise, employing cunning comparisons that allow him to place his hyper-realistic story deep within the ordinariness of our existence. On the first page, the reader is sucked in at speed:

My eyes slammed themselves capital O open and my neck and shoulders arched back in a huge inward heave, a single world-swallowing lung gulp of air. Litres of dry oxygen and floor dust whistled in and snagged up my throat with knifey coughing spasms. I choked and spat through heaves and gasps and coughing coughing coughing heaves. Snot ropes unwound from my nose. My eyesight melted into hot blurs over my cheeks.

I found this character description particularly visual:

Dr Randle was more like an electrical storm or some complicated particle reaction than a person. A large clashing event of a woman whose frizzy hack job of white-brown hair hummed against a big noisy blouse which, in turn, strobed in protest against her tartan skirt. She had strontium grey eyes which crackled away to themselves behind baggy lids. She made the air feel doomy, faintly radioactive. You half expected your ears to pop.

Hall's similes demonstrate his capacity to twist language into inventive, unexpected associations, and his obsession for language is made clear as it finds its way into so many of his comparisons: 'It was still raining outside. A dramatic wet sheet broke against the window followed by a haiku of fat rain taps as the wind took a breath'.

Conceptually, the book carries out a relentless assault. The framework of Hall's extraordinary plot allows him to take a concept down from the shelf, put in a snowdome and shake it around to see how it comes out in a new arrangement:

Maybe it's natural for questions to outlive their answers. Or maybe answers don't die but are just lost more easily, being so small and specific, like a coin dropped from the deck of a ship and into the big deep sea.

If you find the intellectual vacillations of the book a lot to take in, focus for a while on the various cameos of protagonist Eric's cat, Ian. He's a well-drawn character for an animal, his actions often described through brilliant, personifying descriptions:

After a moment, Ian's big ginger body stepped out, cautiously at first, and then, looking around with that not bad expression dads use when looking at other dads' new cars, he sauntered off into the depths of the warheouse.

The book also famously includes some dramatic typesetting, engineered by the author himself. I felt too that there was more to be read into some of the character names than first met the eye, either through aural similarity or the use of anagrams. In a book where a laptop becomes a lethal weapon, and someone's life can be endangered through an ill-chosen download, do the names Mycroft Ward and Clio Aames conjure any associations?