The Coma (Paperback)

by Alex Garland (Author) "Until the telephone rang, the only sound in my office was the scratching of my pen as I made margin notes, corrections, and amendments..." (more)
Key Phrases: alex garland, brass clasp, Little Richard, Good Golly Miss Molly, Monkey God

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Bookmarks Magazine
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. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 208 pages
• Publisher: Riverhead Trade (July 5, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1594480850
• ISBN-13: 978-1594480850
• Product Dimensions: 7.9 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.2 out of 5 stars See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #384,075 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars An Hour to Kill, November 21, 2004

By	A. Ross (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews (TOP 100 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Coma (Hardcover)

I loved all of Garland's previous work, from "The Beach" to "The Tesseract" to his creepy story "R.S.S." in "The Weekenders" anthology and his script for the film "28 Days Later" -- but this was a severe disappointment. The idea at work is hardly original, the execution of it is mostly tepid, and the overall effect is reminiscent of being the only sober person in basement of stoned teenagers discussing consciousness. The line between dream life and reality is a recurring theme in Garland's work -- in "The Beach" there was the dead man popping up to "talk" to the protagonist, in "The Tesseract" there was the researcher recording the dreams of two street urchins, and "28 Days Later" begins with a man waking from a coma and trying to figure out if he was actually awake and in the "real" world. In this latest work, we meet a man who tries to intervene with a group of teenagers harassing a woman on the subway, only to get his head kicked in and end up in a coma (if nothing else, reading the book will put a damper on one's instinct to stick up for the innocent).

The primary force driving the narrative is the man's quest to unravel his own identity and wake himself up from his coma. The reader is taken down paths which, just like dreams, are somewhat askew and surreal. These are occasionally interesting, such as a bookstore in which the classics have been reduced to their single most famous line, or the record store selling albums where the lyrics are slightly wrong. However, midway through, Garland comes right out and says that it's impossible to represent the strange state of dream consciousness using the written word. That's pretty much a given, but one wishes it could have been a little more interesting. The man becomes obsessed with locating his briefcase, which he believes will contain something that will give him a hint of who is, and thereby allow him to wake himself up. At the end of the book, this finally does happen, but the result is something most readers will have guessed at -- especially if they have watched more than a few episodes of The Twilight Zone.

Is Garland a good writer? Certainly. But here he seems to be indulging in an idea mainly of interest to him, and it never really carries much weight. It's reads as if he was striving for a Camusesque novella and falls far short. Speaking of short... this book took me just barely over an hour to read. It's copiously illustrated with evocative simple woodcuts by Garland's father, and the designer has done yeoman's work padding the leading and margins to arrive at the hugely inflated page count. There are much better (and longer) books written from within the coma patient's head, two recent ones that come to mind are Irvine Welsh's "Marabou Stork Nightmares" and the book that influenced it, Iain Banks' "The Bridge."

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant, haunting piece of art, July 31, 2004

By	Rebecca Blitch "aka Becky" (Largo, FL USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Coma (Hardcover)

What a bizarre, haunting little book! If you're familiar with Garland's work that description probably won't surprise you. Garland is a master of literary bizarreness. His precise and evocative language has, in the past, led him to be compared to Graham Greene; this novel, in my opinion, owes more to Kafka in its complex simplicity, sense of dread and sometimes hopelessness, and just all-around creepiness. The concept is simple: what happens, what does the mind experience, when one is in a trauma-induced coma? The answers Garland provides are chilling. In a way, the entire novel is a meditation on Descartes' age-old argument of "cogito ergo sum," but Garland is interested in that space in which *only* thought exists (not, I suspect, what Descartes had in mind). The result is downright disturbing at times, and the sense of confused reality is only heightened by the wood-carved illustrations (provided by Garland's father, a London political cartoonist) that follow each chapter. These illustrations are essential to the book's atmosphere, and I spent just as much time pondering them as I did pondering the questions about Being that the younger Gardner raised. This book will probably not find a wide audience, and will disappoint/bore/go over the heads of most book-club types. But it's a truly brilliant work, and I believe it will secure Garland a place amongst the masters.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A Mad Trip Through (Un)Consciousness, June 27, 2004

By	Sebastien Pharand (Orléans, Ontario, Canada) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This review is from: The Coma (Hardcover)

It had been a while since Alex Garland had published a novel. After The Beach and The Tesseract, Garland worked on the amazing horror flick 28 Days Later. The Coma, a short novella that is, like everything else Garland has written, not easily classifiable. This ends up being the novel's forte and also its biggest flaw.

While trying to help a woman who is being attacked on a subway, Carl is beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead. A long while later, he wakes up from the coma the attack left him in and returns home. But he soon realizes that nothing is as it used to be. Things have changed, things are wrong, things are just unexplainable. Time seems to be moving faster, Carl finds himself moving from one place to another without remembering having done so. And how about those invisible bleeding wounds on his body?

Garland weaves his narrative just like a dream. One second we're standing in one place, the next we're in a total different setting. Things are disjointed and they don't always make sense for the reader. Until, that is, something crucial is revealed to us that changes the way we see or understand the events taking place in the narrative.

Told in the first person over very short chapters, with interesting visual images to guide us through the story, The Coma is a story that is both imaginary and frighteningly real. As always, Garland lets his imagination run wild to create a one-of-a-kind trip to the human psyche.

Then again, the book left me craving for more. I wanted more out of Carl, wanted to learn more from the characters and the situations they were in. Over the course of two very short chapters, Garland tells us a bit about Carl's childhood, but not enough to eradicate my curiosity. Some sections could have been fleshed out a bit more. It's rare that you'll want more out of a story. These days, most book should listen to the 'less is more' rule. But The Coma is an exception to the rule.

As it stands, The Coma is a very fast read that you'll probably want to read again. An original read that will leave you craving for more.