In the latest novel by the bestselling author of the Generation X thriller
The Beach, a young man who fell into a coma after being assaulted on the London Underground tries to piece his life back together. Shuttling in dreamlike fashion between his hospital bed and a hazy succession of places—his apartment, friends' houses, a record shop, a bookshop, his childhood home, a shrine—he sifts through conflicting memories of his past and unanswerable questions about his present. The novel reaches for Kafkaesque ambiguity—is the narrator awake or in a dream? did he ever come out of the coma? is there a difference between ourselves and our fantasies?—but Garland's parable feels more like an exercise than a true exploration, constricted by its sluggish pace and plodding prose ("I stood. I raised a hand. I said, 'Hey' "). Forty woodblock illustrations by the author's father, Sir Nicholas Garland, a political cartoonist and artist, are handsome but function as little more than filler. By the end of the story, with the narrator unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, he finally decides, "None of it was real. I didn't care." Chances are good the reader will feel the same way.
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Owner Reviews, Ratings, Comments and Criticism
I loved all of Garland's previous work, from "The Beach" to "The Tesseract" to his creepy story "R.S.S." in "The Weekenders" anthology and his script for the film "28 Days Later" -- but this was a severe disappointment. The idea at work is hardly original, the execution of it is mostly tepid, and the overall effect is reminiscent of being the only sober person in basement of stoned teenagers discussing consciousness. The line between dream life and reality is a recurring theme in Garland's work -- in "The Beach" there was the dead man popping up to "talk" to the protagonist, in "The Tesseract" there was the researcher recording the dreams of two street urchins, and "28 Days Later" begins with a man waking from a coma and trying to figure out if he was actually awake and in the "real" world. In this latest work, we meet a man who tries to intervene with a group of teenagers harassing a woman on the subway, only to get his head kicked in and end up in a coma (if nothing else, reading the book will put a damper on one's instinct to stick up for the innocent).
The primary force driving the narrative is the man's quest to unravel his own identity and wake himself up from his coma. The reader is taken down paths which, just like dreams, are somewhat askew and surreal. These are occasionally interesting, such as a bookstore in which the classics have been reduced to their single most famous line, or the record store selling albums where the lyrics are slightly wrong. However, midway through, Garland comes right out and says that it's impossible to represent the strange state of dream consciousness using the written word. That's pretty much a given, but one wishes it could have been a little more interesting. The man becomes obsessed with locating his briefcase, which he believes will contain something that will give him a hint of who is, and thereby allow him to wake himself up. At the end of the book, this finally does happen, but the result is something most readers will have guessed at -- especially if they have watched more than a few episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Is Garland a good writer? Certainly. But here he seems to be indulging in an idea mainly of interest to him, and it never really carries much weight. It's reads as if he was striving for a Camusesque novella and falls far short. Speaking of short... this book took me just barely over an hour to read. It's copiously illustrated with evocative simple woodcuts by Garland's father, and the designer has done yeoman's work padding the leading and margins to arrive at the hugely inflated page count. There are much better (and longer) books written from within the coma patient's head, two recent ones that come to mind are Irvine Welsh's "Marabou Stork Nightmares" and the book that influenced it, Iain Banks' "The Bridge."
