The Raw Shark Texts, by Steven Hall

The pre-publication excitement about Steven Hall's debut novel The Raw Shark Texts is a familiar story. Translation rights sold to a huge number of territories, four major film studios fighting to make it into a movie, even (it is rumoured) personal phone calls to Hall from Hollywood actresses. Two things make it unusual. First, the book justifies the hype; and, secondly, it's almost impossible to imagine how anyone (even Charlie Kaufman) could turn this mind-scrambler into a Hollywood blockbuster.

The Raw Shark Texts begins three years after an accident that the protagonist has forgotten. Personal injury and amnesia are recurring themes in cult fiction. The most recent example is Tom McCarthy's Remainder, in which the protagonist has suffered from an accident that a large company have paid him millions of pounds not to talk about.

In this novel, Eric Sanderson has lost the last three years of his memory. This plot also has connections with cult cinema - films such as Memento, Suture, Trauma and Stay - which may be what got the studios excited, but Hall's intentions are as much literary as cinematic. His is an innovative, postmodern, metafictional novel most obviously inspired by Paul Auster and Haruki Murakami: both influences acknowledged in the book.

Eric visits a therapist who explains his condition. For 12 months after the accident, he exhibited no symptoms, then his memory loss related only to the night of the accident, after which he began to lose other memories. He has been afflicted by a series of 11 "recurrences", each time suffering a "memory suppression" that leaves his mind a complete blank. Encouraged not to read or write letters to himself, as the tehrapist tells him he has done in the past, Eric goes home and spends time with his whimsically-named cat Ian while he waits for his memory to come back.

But when the letters start arriving, he finds himself incapable of following the therapist's advice and leaving them alone. The letter Eric receives from someone calling himself "the first Eric Sanderson" tells him that the therapist's perspective on his memory loss is wrong, and she cannot help him.

His only hope is to open an envelope addressed to "Ryan Mitchell" and memorise the text. The Ryan Mitchell envelope contains 16 pages of biographical detail about Ryan which Eric considers meaningless. The letters from "the first Eric Sanderson" continue to arrive, but the protagonist ignores them, at least until an unwanted videotape (bringing to mind Lost Highway and Hidden) arrives.

Then, 60 pages in, Hall reveals his special effect: a giant shark, named the Ludovican, made up of text on the page (53 pages form an old-fashioned flicker book of the shark), which feeds on memories. It is this word-shark that is eating Sanderson's memories and causing his debilitating amnesia.

At this point the novel changes from Auster-esque hardboiled parody, combined with Murakami-style everyday surrealism. Instead it becomes a bizarre version of Jaws, where most of the action takes place inside someone's head. For some readers, this may prove too much, but if you quit here, you'll miss out on the most original reading experience of the year.

Hall seems almost drunk on literature, his chapter titles referencing everyone from Italo Calvino to Hari Kunzru. Occasionally, this can be to the demerit of the novel, but it is a common debut novelist's weakness to acknowledge every influence. As Eric seeks help from a research student named Mr. Nobody, he's introduced to idea lampreys, conceptual crabs: a whole ocean of mental marine life.

Hall takes his concept almost to breaking point, and the novel is constantly on the point of complete collapse both typographically and plotwise. But every time it feels as if Hall has, in TV parlance, "jumped the shark" (sorry), he ups the stakes and pulls everything back together.

This is a literary novel that's more out there than most science fiction. The only other book I have read that approaches the same territory is Scarlett Thomas's similarly experimental The End of Mr Y, which, although by an English author, has been published first in America and will be released by Canongate later in the year.

The Raw Shark Texts is, for once, a novel that genuinely isn't like anything you have ever read before, and could be as big an inspiration to the next generation of writers as Auster and Murakami have been to Hall. And if a big-name actress does get involved with the project, I hope she's invigorated by the innovation of the book, and agrees to strap on the fin.

Matt Thorne's latest novel is 'Cherry' (Phoenix)

Interesting? Click here to explore further