The Coma

From dream-scene to dream-scene

Losing your mind, Carl says, is an accent. It's a way of speaking. It is "sort of dreary. But it's also despairing and frustrated. If the tone was matched to a voice, it would be the nasal voice of a boring man, intoning his despair weakly: Oh no, no, God, oh dear, oh, no....But forget about what the voice is saying — it's the tone that's important".

The story Carl tells is this: he is in his office one night, late, and his secretary calls, and he realizes she went home hours ago. She is phoning to remind him that his last train leaves at 12:17 am. So he puts some papers in his briefcase, and catches the train, and not long after, trying to prevent the mugging of a young woman, is beaten senseless by four adolescents. When he wakes, the doctors inform him he has been quite badly hurt, he has been unconscious; then they send him home in a taxi, in a pair of green pyjamas and some slippers. "It's okay to take things slowly", the taxi driver advises him. But Carl can't seem to settle in himself. Things are odd. He wakes in the night, and though his bandages are soaked with blood he can't find an open wound. His friends don't seem to know him as intimately as they did. Soon it is clear he hasn't woken up at all. He is still in the hospital. He is still unconscious. He is in a coma, and he can't even remember who he is.

The reader has already reached this conclusion, as Alex Garland intends. From the start, Carl's register is off. It isn't simply that his tone is dreary; it is that the way he observes things gives the impression of not belonging to the world at all. There is a meaningless specificity to his story of himself. He gives us a precise rendering of the television news, but conveys nothing about his personal life: whom he might expect to see, who might have been waiting for him to recover. He describes a car doing a three-point turn so meticulously that he might never have seen such a thing before; he calls the car's speedometer "the speed-dial", a usage which is quaint and distancing. He accepts everything that happens to him, giving most of it the same value: then suddenly breaks into a kind of calm panic around some normal, human issue — will he be able to fulfil his ambition, he asks himself, of finding a partner to settle down with? His anxieties are already dream anxieties.

Garland pere et fils have described The Coma as a collaboration. Nicholas Garland's fine woodcuts, like the unnumbered pages, add a further mysterious element to the book's combination of skewedness and alienation. Their lighting effects give it an eroded air. They endorse existential feelings we last experienced in novels in the 1950s. Like father like son, perhaps: the older Garland encourages us to look at the action through vulva like rents in curtains, through half-opened doors, forcing us to reconsider it. His glimpses into rooms or empty cars, streets onto which the light falls as a kind of careful glare, are full of some suspended sense of things. What are we to make of this heap of bandages? Two legs and a lavatory bowl? Some pages are purely black. There are so many images here that we can't be said to be looking at an illustrated book. Sometimes, they crowd in at every other page, like a chorus echoing or counterpointing the text. But neither are we in any sense looking at a graphic novel, in which imagery and framing are required to carry the narrative. In the end, however, we are a long way from the savage 1980s technicality of graphic work by Alan Moore and Dave McKean. The Coma is more interesting than many a graphic novel simply because it isn't entirely sure what it is. Why would someone choose to produce a book this way? The answer to that seems to question the novel as a medium in much the same way as The Coma questions the act of consciousness.

How do you escape a dream? You have no agency. Carl's solution is psychodrama. He enlists a series of proxies — his old friends Anthony and Mary; the secretary, Catherine; his nurse and doctor — to help him rediscover himself. But what he can't remember, they don't know: they are fictions, figments of the dream, metaphors for Carl himself as, reduced to some stay-resident programme (a last-chance loop of code that remains to reboot you when neurological times are hard, a bit of the personality bedded so far back you can't lose it), he trawls the remains of his memory for clues.

In its interrogations of itself, this essential Carl jumps from dream-scene to dream-scene, fiction to fiction, one level of coma to another. One minute he is visiting the Secondhand Record Shop of the Mind, in which the lyrics to Chuck Berry's "Good Golly Miss Molly" are garbled by memory, where the categories though they appear alphabetical are actually emotional, and the shopowner is yourself; the next he is in the bookshop across the road, where Moby-Dick proves to contain only the words, "'Call me Ishmael,' written a few thousand times", and Jane Austen's famous first line has reduced itself to the dubious but hilarious, "It is universally acknowledged that a man in want of a woman is a man in need of things that a woman with needs can want to universally acknowledge...". This novel, Carl complains puzzledly to the girl in the bookshop, goes on in the same vein for another 300-odd pages; it makes you wonder why they teach it at school. "Sir", replies the girl, "I'm going to have to ask you to leave." If these dreams are a kind of investigative acting-out, they are also evasions. In this they remind one of Jacob's Ladder, or the convulsive psychic inversions of the film Angel Heart by Alan Parker, as well as Pincher Martin and his dying flight into the imagination. To describe consciousness as indistinguishable from dreaming is not just to assign it the values of deception but also to risk a similarly large-scale evasiveness. In acknowledgement of that, perhaps, Garland leaves us with one of the older scams of modern fiction. When, in the final, stabilized level of the dream, Carl opens his briefcase and takes out the papers that will tell him who he is, he keeps the knowledge to himself. "It's possible you can guess what I saw", he taunts. "There are no surprises here." We are forced to assemble half a dozen theories. But how will we ever know which is the right one? Only by a close rereading. We are going to be puzzling over, for some time to come, what really happened to Carl.

This Umberto Eco-esque barb neatly planted, The Coma steps back almost politely to allow you to ponder fifty years of cognitive theory, the works of Philip K. Dick and his many recent imitators; not to say cyberpunk, The Matrix and three generations' worth of hallucinogenic abuse. Is it possible to know if you are actually "here" or not? Do androids dream of electric sheep? The Coma may leave you less interested in this than its author is. Even Carl rebels against the question when, about three-quarters of the way through, he draws the conclusion "None of this was real", then promptly admits "I didn't care". We might be dreaming when we are awake, we might be awake when we are dreaming: either way the data is irretrievable. We're trapped in the raw Godelian body — language of not being able to describe fully our own state. We know this already.

As a result, our enjoyment of The Coma must depend on other factors, on whether we feel Alex Garland has added value to the core concepts. Another coma novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax by Liz Jensen, was published almost simultaneously with The Coma and is already the next Hollywood project of Anthony Minghella. It is an engaging Gothic romp written in the blustering language of a schoolboy who seems less a victim of the dream than its optimum denizen. Jensen's story allows for life outside coma, and argues for the liveliness of life itself. By comparison, Garland's is a novel of ideas, focused, emotionally chaste, and produced for the most part in a tone spare to the point of anality. This leads to a curious effect, a terse simplicity rather frightening in the world of padded-up books, which makes the reader want to look away, as if from some public action too transparent, too human. Wait a minute, you want to say: narrative is usually more dissembled than this; and at its best such simplicity suggests a direction all narrative might explore. At its worst, we get the sense that Garland has not only worked himself into a box, but he wants the reader in there with him.

This is a book written avowedly from the shadow of writer's block. Following the huge success of The Beach (1996) and the publication of his less enthusiastically received second novel The Tesseract (1998), Garland's public statements about his fiction -indeed about writing itself -make his block seem unsurprising. "I got my fingers burned with The Tesseract", he said in a recent interview, "because a lot of people said: you've over-reached yourself massively." He is worried that he sounds pretentious. He is worried about the number of adjectives he might have used. He believes in "creative austerity". These are the specifications for a box. "The first thing I was taught in English writing at school", he says, "is that you must never...". What he was warned against is immaterial, the warning tone is what is important. Proscription is everywhere in The Coma, in its careful sentence structures, its strictured point of view, the sense you have of not just a central character but an author in a support collar, the result not so much of whiplash as a conscious act of self-repression. The author, you suspect, mugged himself in some way a few years ago, and is trying to write his way out of the resultant coma.

One can only feel sympathy. Alex Garland is a very good writer. When he does break through, and allow himself to tell a story — or at least some part of it — we only gain.

M. John Harrison's most recent novel, Light, was published in the UK in 2002 and will be released in the US on August 31, 2004.

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