Shark! Shark!

There aren't any in the running for Australia's Top New Species (have you voted yet? Have you? Have you?), but there's a fish which looks a bit like one. 

In other shark-related news, I've just finished reading The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall.  Last night, over dinner with a couple of friends, I failed miserably to describe this book; the best I could come up with was that it's the paperback equivalent of the film Inception.  Which only helps if you've seen Inception, and even then doesn't help very much because The Raw Shark Texts is nothing like Inception, really, except that the plot is completely bonkers. Clever, and creative, and very unique, but still bonkers.  I loved it.

It starts with a man waking up with no memory of who or where he is; not exactly an original premise, maybe, but  that opening is the only unoriginal thing about the book.  I'm willing to bet that the story which unfolds will be unlike anything else you've ever read.

The writing itself is also very enjoyable.  How's this for a character description:

Maybe there should be types of gardener who visit bookish old men to trim and prune and generally tidy them up occasionally, because the real and actual XXX was as overgrown and tangled as an abandoned allotment. His thick salt-and-pepper hair had grown beyond Einstein-esque into a sort of mad rogue plume. A pen between his teeth, two tucked between his ears and several others tucked and knotted and sticking out of his wild hair, made his head look like one of those deceptively fluffy cacti. Blue, black, red and green biro writing covered the backs of his hands, creeper-vined its way up around wrists and forearms, and towards his rolled-up shirtsleeves, which themselves hadn't entirely been spared.  Scrumpled chunks of paper and collected pages bulged from the pockets of his black schoolboy trousers and patchy threadbare dressing gown.  He was smallish and probably somewhere in his late sixties.  The harsh light from the single bulb didn't make it down through his hair canopy too well and the effect was like looking at a man who was peering out at you from the depths of a wardrobe.

(XXX does have a name but I don't want to use it here in case that spoils your enjoyment of the book. You'll understand how this might happen if you read it.  I'm probably being unnecessarily careful about this, but there we have it.)

Parts of the novel are beautifully tender; dialogue between two of the characters captures the awkwardness of fledgling romance (those very earliest moments when you've both realised you really quite like each other but don't have a clue what to do about it) absolutely perfectly.  Equally enchanting is the relationship between Eric, as he eventually discovers he is called, and love-of-his-life Clio.
 
It's funny, too.  Eric has a cat called Ian:

"He's a bit of an areshole," I said, thinking about it.
Scout nodded, smiling at this as she poured herself a cup of tea.
"Well, that's what you want in a cat."
I considered and nodded.  "Yeah, actually it is."

I finished late last night and after I had thought for a while about how clever and creative it was, it occured to me that it is just as well I'm not the kind of person to let my admiration for such brilliance become swamped by feelings of inadequacy before spiraling downwards into a seething pit of bitter resentment.

Then I read the author bio and discovered Steven Hall is two years younger than me.