Alex Garland’s third novel interrogates the differences between dreams and reality.
Originally Published: 2005
Illustrator: Nicholas Garland
“I remembered a few things about waking. I remembered the sense of surprise as dream life and waking life swapped primacy, and the way in which the most tangible and deeply involving dreams could bleach entirely away.”
Alex Garland’s first two novels have both been concerned with dreams somehow. In The Beach all the characters are focused on living out an idealised dream from the human mind. In The Tesseract there is a character that pays children to tell him about their dreams. In The Coma he goes all out on this obsession, wondering how we can tell the difference between dreams and reality.
The novel is told through the eyes of Carl who is traveling home on an underground train when he witnesses a group of men attempt to harass a young girl. As Carl attempts to defend her he is knocked out and falls into a coma.
The rest of the book moves in a haze. We are unsure who anyone is, what is real and what isn’t and we have little to no clue about Carl’s life. And it’s not long before Carl realises he is in a coma, and then spends the remainder of the novel trying to “wake up”.
If we create reality inside our minds. And if you can boil us down to being just our consciousness and no more. The only difference between reality and dreams is that in dreams we are truly alone (we can’t even fully share them with other people when we try to tell them about it), whilst other people are sharing reality with us.
Despite knowing very little about Carl, Garland does a great job at making us like him from the little information we get. Little things such as him staying back late for work and him defending the young girl, we are immediately sympathetic towards him. And because we know so little about him we can project whatever we want onto him creating a different vision for Carl in every reader’s head.
It’s also the way that Carl tells the story. He is quite calm and logical. Trying to work out a way to make himself wake up. He doesn’t ever panic or overload us, he simply tries to translate what is happening to us.
Carl spends his time trying to go back into memories and he is fascinated about all the specific things he can conjure up just from memory. And then in a highlight moment he thinks he is waking up only to fall into a void. A state, I imagine, that is similar to ‘The Sunken Place’ in Jordan Peele’s Get Out.
In this void there is a moment where Carl realises that this is really who he is. Not the body he is inhibits or the environment he is in. He is really just a consciousness floating in a void. And the thought of that is extremely lonely and nauseating. It’s a chilling moment and gets to the core of what the novel is really about.
If we create reality inside our minds. And if you can boil us down to being just our consciousness and no more. The only difference between reality and dreams is that in dreams we are truly alone (we can’t even fully share them with other people when we try to tell them about it), whilst other people are sharing reality with us.
Garland gets to this last part about loneliness a bit less subtle than the rest of the book. A character literally says something like “it’s not a perfect day unless you share it with someone else.” But it is a profound idea nonetheless. Then just as you feel the idea picking up some power the novel ends and you are left wishing it went a bit deeper.
The illustrations by Garland’s father, Nicholas, are a great addition to the book and add to the experience of reading. And character wise this is Garland’s strongest work.
Overall, for a shorter novel The Coma is quite an easy and intriguing read, but fails to go deep enough into its key ideas to make it a truly great novel.
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