The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

Memento, Fight Club, The Machinist, Vanilla Sky, the complete works of Charlie Kaufman - mining the mind for plot has become a Hollywood vogue in recent years, and audiences have become quite accustomed to a po-mo cast of brainwiped heroes who are condemned to follow a breadcrumb-trail through their own memories back to whatever catastrophe began their torment. Literature has its analogues in the reflexive detective stories of Auster, mid-period Amis, Mark Danielewski et al, in which narrator and reader are required to puzzle their way through a story about a man puzzling his way through a story. Well, just when you thought it was safe to go back in the metatext, Steven Hall's debut novel presents the story of a man who wakes up without a memory, only to find himself pursued through a world of letters and concepts by a shark made of words.

The poor sap in question is Eric Sanderson. By way of a sequence of letters from someone claiming to be "The First Eric Sanderson" and a few timely explanations from his psychotherapist, he learns that he has a dissociative condition that periodically erases his memories and into which he lapsed after the death of his girlfriend three years before. Not only that: his former self apologetically informs him that he's being pursued by the largest and most vicious of a race of "conceptual fish" that live in "the linking streams flowing in and between people, through text, pictures, spoken words and TV commentaries... causal relations, witnessed events, touching pasts and futures". After the gigantic word-shark attacks him in his living room, Sanderson and his cat set off to find the one mad scientist who may be able to stop it - encountering in the process a girl called Scout with a nice line in anti-shark weaponry, a mysterious similarity to the dead girlfriend and a concealed agenda of her own.

Hall never stops cracking the whip over his central thriller plot about a man actually being chased by a shark: the metatextual trappings, though occasionally constipated (as when the characters find themselves crawling through a passage shaped like the title of the book), often simply offer a joyous opportunity to restage certain well-known bits of plot with a big shark added. Fight Club, Casablanca and Paul Auster are all namechecked, and all flow, in various ways, into the plot: one narrative substratum offers a version of The Matrix, but with a shark in; another echoes Hitchcock's Vertigo, but with a shark in. Running in counterpoint to all this is a periodically affecting narrative leading up to how Sanderson lost his girlfriend in the first place.

All this adds up to an absorbing if erratic book, by turns completely daft and surprisingly moving, marshalled and related with impressive straight-faced confidence and not half as much clever- cleverness as the sceptical reader might fear. A Hollywood ending and some hints in the introduction suggest that the next thing to happen to this auspicious debut will be a film. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - With A Shark. Now there's a pitch to conjure with.

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