Books

Slaying beast that swallows up identity

The author succeeds in juggling the words we use to see reality.

By KIT REED
Published April 22, 2007

It's not what happens in our lives that makes the difference, psychologists say. It's how we respond to it. In Steven Hall's swift, playful and fearsomely intelligent new novel, it's all conceptual. The second Eric Sanderson discovers that memory, imagination, identity are all linked by the stories people make up to explain their lives.

Hall pulls the reader into Eric Two's story in an explosion of invention. Baffled and likable, the second Eric is being pursued by a conceptual monster that swallows its victim whole, erasing identity, memory, everything that makes him a person. If it catches up with him, he's done for. The only way to survive the monster is to destroy it.

Fortunately, the first Eric Sanderson left behind a series of helpful notes. Naturally, they don't arrive all at once. Some are in code, others are fragmented, but all are useful. Phone this doctor, his first marching orders say. Open the letters that come in this sequence. Follow the instructions faithfully and he may escape the monster.

"The Ludovician is a predator, a shark," Eric One warns. "It feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self. ... Sometimes, the target's body survives this ordeal and may go on to live a second twilight life. ... Such a person may establish a 'bolt-on' identity of their own, but the Ludovician will eventually catch the scent of this and return to complete its kill."

The trauma that unseated the first Eric, we learn, was the death of his girlfriend Clio, who disappeared while scuba diving. To save himself, Eric Two needs to find out exactly what happened to Clio. Fortunately, a lovable girl named Scout turns up to help him on his quest.

It takes a strong writer to juggle memory and identity, the words people use to make sense of reality, without losing the reader along the way. Only an extremely gifted one can keep everything up in the air and keep the reader engaged with everything that's going on.

Kit Reed's most recent novel is The Baby Merchant.

The Raw Shark Texts

By Steven Hall

Canongate, 448 pages, $24

[Last modified April 19, 2007, 12:49:40]