Marc Schultz

Battle of the Buzz: UK Amnesiacs
April 16, 2007

Recently I blogged about what is probably my new favorite of all time (at least for the next couple months), Remainder, the buzz-heavy debut novel from UK writer Tom McCarthy. In it, a British guy with partial amnesia seeks an authentic life through obsessive repetition and reenactment. It's subtle, compulsive reading that sticks with you.

Last week I read another, even more buzz-heavy debut novel from a British writer, Steven Hall, called The Raw Shark Texts. In it, a British guy with total amnesia seeks an authentic life--his old, unremembered one--by obsessively reading and decoding the stack of letters he sent himself before he lost his memory. It's stylish, high-concept, whiz-bang adventure storytelling with a chinese puzzle-box of a premise--centering on a conceptual shark that feeds on memories--an aggressively cinematic tone (the website for the novel features this quote from Mark Haddon: "The bastard love-child of The Matrix, Jaws and The Da Vinci Code.") and lots of text-twisting gimmickry. It doesn't stick with you as much as it holds you down, forces clever ideas into your craw and helps you chew.

Not that it's bad; altogether it's an above-average suspense thriller, and the first two thirds are pretty phenomenal. But it brings to mind what an old professor of mine said about the 1997 movie The Game: "It's like watching porn. You're like, 'Oh, this is interesting. Oh, this is very interesting. Oh my, this is very, very interesting. Okay it's not that interesting anymore.'"*

So: if you read only one UK amnesiac novel this season, I say go with the McCarthy. But if you browse only one UK amnesiac novel this season, make it Raw Shark--there's a fifty-page flipbook toward the back that's very, very interesting.

Posted by Marc Schultz on April 16, 2007 | Comments (1)