Magical realism often has split worlds: sanity vs. insanity, dreamworld vs. reality, life vs. the afterlife. In a tenuous time straddling two centuries, when the steel girded ego of the American empire is in danger of collapse, it's not surprising this genre of fiction, a kind of literary schizophrenia, has been popular for a few years.
TRST is also a kind of schizophrenic exercise, most notably exploring the boundary between the real world vs. the thought world, where curious conceptual fish swim around and devour memories and text forms. But having read the first half of TRST as magical realism, I found it to be an unsatisfactory experience. Why would I read it with this expectation? This book was recommended to me by someone who really enjoys Haruki Murakami.
Magical realism often has bizarre, sometimes illogical events, but there is a kind of aloof but apparent passivity or sometimes blatant reluctance to accept these strange set of affairs by the characters, even if they ultimately go through and rationalize their bizarre encounters. Hence, magical realism is sometimes described as having elements of 'dream logic', where strange, fragmented patterns occur, yet there is a kind of (sub)rational flow, an associative thread which holds everything together, no matter how fragile.
For instance, in Murakami's work, a character may see a little, green creature digging up a hole in her back yard. And she wonders, how odd. Or a man walks into a closet in a high rise, only to find a deep subterranean well inside. And he thinks, I wonder what this is doing here. In TRST, there is no moment of doubt. Everything happens at once. Almost immediately, a character is attacked by a 'conceptual shark' made of text that jumps out from his television set. Later, characters teleport from a basement somewhere in the UK to a ship floating off the shores of Greece. A postcard someone holds becomes a digital teleportation portal. And no one, most notably the protagonist, questions any of this, or attempts a rationalization. It just happens as a matter of course.
This kind of no nonsense, stick to the facts (albeit strange facts), earnest story telling makes TRST read more like science fiction rather than magical realism. The focus in this book is plot, rather than a deep exploration of psychology or language. Sure, the book is about language, about textual landscapes. But it just doesn't sing. It's not eloquent. It starts and stops. It's uneven. It stutters. Sometimes it's downright awkward. Sounds suspiciously like most SF out there...
Don't get me wrong. I liked TRST. A lot. But as mentioned before, I first started reading it expecting something in the vein of Murakami. All the elements were there, but something just did not click for me. It wasn't until I started to read it as science fiction halfway through that I started to really enjoy the book on its own terms, a kind of fun SF plot-driven romp.
In this respect, I think the brightest parts of TRST is conceptual, similar to the way that 'conceptual art' highlights the ideas and the process of art making rather than painting a pretty picture. An artist who comes to mind when thinking of TRST is Damien Hirst (who is also from the UK), and in particular, his work 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (which also has a shark as its main theme). Like Hirst, Hall explores the boundaries between mind/body, space/time, air/water, and the visual/the hidden (or sublime). And both use the physical form of a shark as a representation of fear, awe, or power. But do I want to have an old, decaying shark in a smelly tank sitting in my living room? It's probably something better enjoyed from afar, as a concept. A conceptual shark.
