Fishy tales

Patrick Ness experiences déjà vu with the amnesiac narrator of Steven Hall's The Raw Shark Texts
The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall

The Raw Shark Texts

by Steven Hall

428pp, Canongate, £12.99

Steven Hall's debut opens, as so many novels seem to do these days, with a young amnesiac losing his memory after an unspecified traumatic event. Eric Sanderson wakes up in a flat with no idea of who or where he is. He finds out only because the old Eric Sanderson, the one before the memory loss, has prepared a series of letters telling him his identity and what he should do next. The first letter directs him to Dr Randle, a frizzy-haired "electrical storm" of a psychiatrist who tells him that this all happened after the death of his girlfriend Clio and that he should under no circumstances read any more of the old Eric Sanderson's letters.

Rather than seek other advice, Eric holes up in his flat with his cat Ian and tries to establish a new identity for himself. He eventually opens the letters from the old Eric, which duly tell him to surround himself with four dictaphones at all times and to assume the blandest false identity possible. All of which will protect him from the Ludovician. The Ludovician is a thought fish, a gigantic conceptual shark which "feeds on human memories and the intrinsic sense of self". Except it's also, in a way, a real shark which can really eat you. Sort of. Unless you're protecting yourself in a cage of four dictaphones, which create a "non-divergent conceptual loop" that repels it, just like a shark cage.

Still with us? After the first attack by the Ludovician, Eric finds himself, cat in tow, on the trail of the "Un-Space Exploration Committee" to seek out "crypto-conceptual oceanologist" Dr Trey Fidorous. Along the way, he escapes the nefarious Mr Nobody with the sudden help of the beautiful Scout, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Clio. Scout tells Eric about evil mastermind Mycroft Ward (say it slowly), less a villain than a malignant consciousness imprinting himself on innocent people. Perhaps there's a way to kill two birds with one stone. And that, of course, is going to require a conceptual boat.

Yes, this does sound like a novel only a certain type of undergraduate could love, and the list of ultra-cool pastiches is extensive: The Matrix, Memento, Paul Auster, Mark Z Danielewski's House of Leaves, Chuck Palahniuk, and especially Haruki Murakami's Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. And The Raw Shark Texts only really takes off in its last part, when Hall goes for broke and recreates Jaws - not just referencing it, but actually recreating it, plot lines, order of death, climax and everything.

There is, however, an exuberance here that keeps the self-conscious cult aspects from getting irritating. Hall acknowledges his influences directly and with enthusiasm, and his whimsy with typeface and page layout is usually to a purpose. Even the 50-page flipbook of an approaching shark late in the novel is surprisingly effective and chilling in context. And though his romantic dialogue is hackneyed, he's an effective writer of both horror and adventure.

The problem is that this is at least the third novel I've read in the past year about a man trying to recreate reality after losing his memory. John Haskell's American Purgatorio was unbearably solipsistic, while Tom McCarthy's Remainder was pleasingly eerie. The Raw Shark Texts falls somewhere in between, with an added dash of adventure story. There's another one along this month, from Sam Taylor (The Amnesiac). For now, though, a literary moratorium on young male amnesiacs would be welcome. Don't women ever lose their memories?

· Patrick Ness's most recent book is Topics About Which I Know Nothing (Harper Perennial)

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