Books: The Coma by Alex Garland

Crisis of conscious

By John Ziebell

Alex Garland has worked for nearly a decade against the popularity of a best-selling first novel--or more accurately, under the shadow of the movie made from it. Even now, there are people waiting for him to rewrite The Beach--one of those book/movie events that middlebrow critics call "generational"--or at least a story that could be turned into a similar Hollywood vehicle. Those fans didn't have much to say about Garland's second book, The Tesseract, which required a modicum of attention and commitment. I'm not sure how they'll approach his third novel, The Coma; it's short, and slick, and even has pictures...if only it didn't deal with pesky philosophical quandaries like what exactly goes on inside those brainpans of ours.

Between books, Garland wrote the apocalypse/zombie flick 28 Days Later, which begins with a bike messenger waking from a coma to find the world, uh, radically altered. Garland liked the coma idea so well that he used it as the basis for this novel, and the conceit has a lot of appeal. The premise of a comatose protagonist provides an excuse for a novelist to delve into the unknowable concept of consciousness, and it's also a narrative setup that Garland uses well. The storyline is compelling, executed with a smart and carefully crafted spareness and illustrated generously with nifty retro-abstract woodcuts by Garland's father, Nicholas, the London Telegraph political cartoonist.

The book opens with Carl, a white-collar overachiever, leaving his office just in time to catch the last train home and, after a haunting segue into the realm of urban dread, be kicked senseless by four teenage thugs. We don't know Carl well, but he seems to be an honest and fairly likable narrator, so we're glad that he comes to in the hospital, battered but not damaged in any permanent way.

Apparently, that is. Because once Carl leaves the hospital his life develops some odd skips and jumps, such as blackouts that fragment not only time but reality, as if awkwardly reassembled by one of those old film directors who favored montage. He finds himself soaked in blood from an invisible wound, winds up at a friend's house with no explanation of how he got there and has an ongoing dialogue with a nurse who cared for him at the hospital.

"It can be hard to figure out what has meaning and what doesn't," Carl says at one point in the novel, the kind of seemingly innocuous phrase that resonates in more ways than we can count.

Carl's new world is referenced by appearance, not content. The great novels he remembers have been rendered meaningless, simply opening sentences like "Call me Ishmael" or "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times" repeated for hundreds of pages. Recorded song lyrics morph and melodies loop back upon themselves, the altered choruses repeated ad infinitum. There is significance in detail, however; the difference between original and replacement glass in windowpanes has real-world precision, for example, or the way a woman sits down. But the devil is in those details when even physics can go awry, with gravity doing strange things...in reality? Or in memory?

We're not surprised to discover--to share our narrator's discovery--that this story is not happening in real time, that Carl in fact has not yet awakened after his attack. But we're glad to be along for the ride. Even comatose, Carl has solid intellectual chops, and once he figures out that he's still unconscious, physically if not literally, his goal is to simply wake up. The narrative is understandable enough, and entertaining enough, and although Garland may not answer those age-old metaphysical questions about consciousness, there is reward enough in watching him try.