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OneMansView
, April 04, 2011
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Escaping sleep and dreams
The weather-beaten, desolate, murky, and ragged Ashdown, an old, imposing stone mansion perched on a cliff on the English coast, is the perfect metaphor for the tenuous, difficult connections of four university students who lived there in the mid-80s, went their separate ways with little ceremony, but are now, twelve years later, unbeknownst to them linked again through their participation in a sleep disorder clinic that has taken over Ashdown.
In rather abrupt shifts from the present to the past, it is learned that “Gregory” from the student days, now Dr. Dudden and proprietor of the clinic, is able to indulge his creepy, voyeuristic obsessions with sleep, including bothersome experiments in the basement of his clinic. Terry Worth, a film student and now a noted film critic, has been invited to the clinic as an object for study because of his claims that he virtually never sleeps. Sarah, now a school teacher, has led a distressing life due to any number of complications and embarrassments related to her undiagnosed narcolepsy and a disturbing inability to separate vivid dreams from reality. Among them all, it is Robert who is most troubled because he cannot resolve his sub-conscious gender-identity issues with his painful, total love for Sarah, whose flights from reality he vigorously defends. And it is Robert who seems to be unaccounted for at this later date.
The book is complexly plotted, with more than a few convenient coincidences and bits and pieces of information slowly revealed, which allows both the reader and the characters to not only fill in the blanks of the past, but also to perhaps permit some measure of closure on long-standing concerns. There are some important secondary characters who supply key information at the right time, such as a young girl that Robert and Sarah had taken to the beach many years before.
The book is not without its edifying aspects concerning sleep disorder technicalities, but it is the social implications that stand out. The implied commentary on excessiveness and absurdities is most interesting. Dudden’s one-dimensional approach to sleep disorders, under the shield of scientific method, ignoring social realities and consequences, comes to mind. Terry is an odd character. First, there is his obsession with an Italian film director and a supposedly lost film and its perplexing connection to a dream of Robert’s. However, his shift from sleeping fourteen hours a day as a student to eschewing all sleep represents the ridiculous, given voice by Dudden’s declaration that sleep is for losers.
Even though the characters are a bit exaggerated, the book is primarily an interesting combining of dreams and hopes, misunderstandings ��" both of self and others, the fragility of love, and the possibilities of ever getting a handle on it all.
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