The Coma - Hardcover

Alex, Garland

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1573222739 ISBN 13: 9781573222730

Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover, 2004

Synopsis

Having been attacked on the Underground, a man wakes up in a hospital and begins to question his emergence from a coma, in a tale complemented with original woodblock illustrations. By the author of The Beach and The Tesseract. 50,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Alex Garland is the author of the bestselling generational classic The Beach and of The Tesseract, a national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book. He also wrote the original screenplay of the recent critically acclaimed film 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle.

Reviews

Most reviewers compared The Coma to comic books or film, perhaps because, as a novel, it doesn’t hold up terribly well. Its brevity necessitates some glaring omissions, such as Carl’s age and job, and it’s tough to care about the characters when we don’t know much about them. Garland aims not so much to tell a good story as to examine and perhaps replicate altered states of consciousness. Some find the project intriguing, but for most, Garland’s insights aren’t worth their narrative price. Blending illustration with a quick-cutting style that hearkens back to Garland’s screenwriting days (he wrote the film “28 Days Later”), The Coma may hold some interest for those who enjoy literary experimentation for its own sake. For others, however, it may prove unsatisfying.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

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.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Slight but entertaining, this Mobius strip of a novel should fuel the cult following that Garland cultivated among twentysomethings with The Beach (1996) and the screenplay for 28 Days Later, which imagined an England overrun by zombies. Like that film, this book follows a man who awakens from a coma inside a London hospital. But in this case, the dawning horrors he faces might all be inside his head. What we know, or think we know, is that the man's name is Carl. One night, on the last train home, he stands to intervene when a gang of young toughs accosts a fellow passenger. The next thing Carl knows, he is in the hospital trying to swim back to consciousness. From there, the spare, sly story takes several Kafkaesque turns, its foreboding mood heightened by the woodblock illustrations of Garland's father. We watch, admiring, as Carl dopes out his states of consciousness and logically navigates a course back toward normal. But just when the facts start coming into focus, the view blurs up again, and we cannot help but smile. Frank Sennett
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Riverhead Hardcover
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1573222739
• ISBN 13: 9781573222730
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 208