a chance and signed me up after just a couple of chapters. Then we went out with it to Canongate and they wanted it, which was awesome. But even after it came out there were a lot of people saying, ‘will you tell us what your book is about?’ structo: How long does that usually take? hall: I got it down so that you could get the idea of the story across without getting bogged down. I know some people at my publishers developed a process of telling the emotional character story, and then saying, ‘and then there’s this conceptual shark’, and then push on as if they haven’t just said the word conceptual, and just watch people slowly work out what that means. But, yeah, it’s an unusual book. structo: The Raw Shark Texts has emerged onto the internet in the form of the ‘unchapters’ and the ‘negatives’. Can you explain a little about what they are? hall: For every chapter in The Raw Shark Texts there’s an unchapter, so 36 of them eventually, and some of them are offshoots or continuations of the story, little bits that have been missing. Some of them are indexes or lists. There’s a prologue, one of them is an entire encyclopaedia of unusual fish. Just lots of things one step removed from the book. There’s one about the origin of Ian and Gavin, and there’s one about Gavin the Cat. There’s one about one of the villains in the story which was printed and written as a one-off and left out in the world. It was taken but has never resurfaced, so that one’s lost now. The idea is that there’s an ‘unbook’ for the book. structo: Was that conceived along with the original novel, or has it emerged since? hall: It was conceived alongside it. Towards the end of writing Raw Shark, and really understanding the kind of book I was trying to write and what I wanted it to do. One of the big things in the book is about loss and incompleteness and about some things that a person can move heaven and earth to get hold of but will slip through your fingers. I just loved the idea that the book is not quite complete; that there are some things you don’t know, some things that would help you understand the book, but which are lost. structo: Is there much you can say about the next book? hall: It’s not a case of not wanting to talk about it, it’s just that it’s almost parental. What are the best choices I can make for this little thing that will give it the best chance? What should I say that people will be interested in, what should I not say until people get to see it? Either way, it’s bigger and more complicated than the last one. structo: I think the people who enjoyed Raw Shark would appreciate that.
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