Book Review: The Coma by Alex Garland

RACHEL SOO THOW - 5 OCT 2021

“Detail. Spectacular. Fractal. The threads that constructed my shirt, and the smaller threads that constructed the larger threads. The shapes of the clouds above, the shapes that led to further shapes, and the slow movement of the clouds across the sky… Presented by my memory effortlessly, with no act of concentration. No pause to assemble or consider the image as my gaze swept from left to right, or up or down, or anywhere.”

After the success of The Beach, Garland’s new novel is incredibly straightforward - our protagonist Carl intervenes when a group of teenage boys attempt to assault the subway’s lone other passenger, a young woman, and they beat him severely enough to put him into a coma. This all happens within the first five pages and what follows is a harrowing account or recollection on his faltering consciousness.

Time is oddly compressed, old friends act strangely, objects appearing without pretence and flavours are just all off; an alternate reality drawing on fragments of the mind and snippets of reality. The sense of dawning horror is heightened with the accompaniment of woodcut illustrations made by political cartoonist and the author’s father, Nicholas Garland. The thinking self is questioned - treating metaphorical concepts is at its best a discipline that values patience and tolerates ambiguity. We may not be understood as human beings but we are vaults made up of words and silences, of speechless sorrows and shrouded fears. Within this wilderness, Garland has successfully created a novel composed of a single arc where the intonations and cadences of the human voice are part of the inner world - unarticulated tensions bristle in the air, meanings are confused and ghosts enter the room. Where it lacks in plot-twists, it makes up for in atmosphere and tone and is reminiscent in its shifting alienation of Kafka and Ishiguro.

“You wake, you die. The formulation is correct. When you wake, you lose a narrative, and you never get it back. Now moments from waking, the death is suddenly frightening. I want to hold it off as long as possible. But I don’t think I can.”

---

---