A gloomy Victorian manor called Ashdown, perched on a precipice overlooking the English coastline like the anthropomorphic castle of a 19th-century gothic romance, is the setting for much of this engrossing and wildly inventive tale of demented scientists, obsessive desire, youthful idealism and anomie. As in Coe's previous book, The Winshaw Legacy, such gothic trappings serve a thoroughly contemporary story that traces the lives of several students who lived at Ashdown in the early 1980s. Then a university dormitory, it has since become a clinic for the study of sleep disorders run by the sadistic Dr. Gregory Dudden, a former student there. In chapters named in descending order after the clinical stages of sleep, the novel follows the strange coincidences of the summer of 1994 that re-acquaint Dudden with people from his past: Sarah, his narcoleptic college girlfriend, now a disillusioned schoolteacher living in London; Terry, an insomniac film critic under Dudden's supervision; and Terry's college friend Robert, whose long unrequited fixation with Sarah and confusion over his own gender led to a post-graduation vanishing act that is only explained in the very last chapter. In a series of plot twists and reversals as intricate as the electrodes that festoon the heads of the patients at Ashdown, the novel also manages to describe a university class polarized by the politics of the 1980s; the life and work of a fictitious Italian film director; an eponymous novel-within-a-novel about "midnight kidnappings" and a "notorious criminal called the Owl"; a reminiscence of the British film industry whose footnotes are hilariously askew; and an essay interpreting the events in Sarah's life from the perspective of her Lacanian psychiatrist. Balancing self-knowing references to semiotics and psychoanalysis with elegant plot symmetries, Coe proves himself as adept an architect of sparkling, highly caffeinated fictional conceits as he is a satirist of the ambiguities of identity and the afflictions of the sleep-deprived.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Coe's first novel since his prize-winning The Winshaw Legacy (LJ 12/94) is likewise witty and intelligent. The title refers to Ashdown, a large mansion on the British coast that was converted to a dormitory by a small university and later used as a sleep research center run by an increasingly crazed doctor. The book tracks down a number of offbeat characters, including the doctor, a narcoleptic bisexual, a transsexual, and an insomniac film critic, who as students lived together in Ashdown and whose later lives are linked by a number of coincidences, many having to do with sleep pathology. An author's note warns the reader that odd-numbered chapters track down the characters in their student days in the early 1980s while even-numbered ones are set in 1996. Coe's skillful writing makes this structure an innovative means of exposition, with chapters and events flowing smoothly. The story has some surprising twists, and Coe mostly manages to avoid cliched characters, although his mad doctor is almost over the top. Recommended for all fiction collections.?Reba Leiding, Rensselaer Polytechnic Inst., Troy, N.Y.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Kirkus Reviews
An audacious, often wickedly funny meditation on the vexed precincts of sleep and sex, following the adventures of four characters whose wayward paths repeatedly intertwine, by the author of The Winshaw Legacy (1995). Ashdown, an elderly mansion on the English coast, is serving, in 1983, as a residence for university students. Bright, insecure Sarah lives there, trapped in a relationship with manipulative Gregory, and increasingly drawn to fragile, troubled Robert. Terry, obsessed with cinema, shares with Sarah a sleep disorder: Sarah falls into fugue-like states in which her dreams become more convincing than reality; Terry, fueled by coffee and the drive to succeed, finds it increasingly difficult to sleep at all. Gregory dumps Sarah, and goes off to London to make his way in medical research. Robert disappears, and is later rumored to be dead. Thirteen years later, Terry and Gregory end up back at Ashdown. It has now become the site of Gregory's controversial sleep research clinic. Terry, a failed writer, returns as a patient, having, he claims, been unable to sleep for most of the past decade. Convinced that humanity is tyrannized by sleep, Gregory is secretly searching for a way to teach humans to do without it, experimenting on rats, dogs, and, finally, peoplewith devastating results. Sarah, having tried both marriage and a long lesbian affair, still pines for Robert. The hectic plot provides Coe with plenty of opportunities to satirize British medicine and the increasingly harsh, hustling nature of British society, as well as the confusions of modern love. Weaving through the story, offering a variety of metaphors for creativity and sex, is the dark river of sleep. Gregory gets a grisly, appropriate comeuppance, and an astonishingly transformed Robert reunites with Sarah in one of the strangest, and most moving, encounters in recent fiction. In all: a droll, ingenious novel, its satire nicely leavened by true romance. -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
Review
"Intricately plotted and ingeniously constructed. . . . A deft satire . . . a strange and poignant love story." --The Wall Street Journal
"Often disconcerting, sometimes moving, frequently funny. . . . Coe eviscerates the bottom-liners with hilarious bare-toothed ferocity." --The Los Angeles Times Book Review
"Jonathan Coe has written a witty, engaging romance that reinvigorates the old saw that life is a dream." --The New York Times Book Review
"An epic farce fueled by romance and satire. . . . It is also a hilarious and deeply touching tale. . . .Love, tenderness, affection: The House of Sleep glows with these qualities, and exalts them." --San Francisco Chronicle
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From the Inside Flap
novel."
--Erica Wagner, The Times (London)
Following The Winshaw Legacy--Coe's ecstatically reviewed American debut, winner of the John Lewellyn Rhys Prize in England and France's coveted Prix du Meilleur Livre Étranger--comes this beguiling, eccentric entertainment.
Ashdown--a vast clifftop manor on the English coast--was once a university residence, where a group of students met briefly before going their separate ways. Twelve years later, it has been transformed into a clinic for sleep disorders, and a series of strange coincidences and ostensible synchronicities draws the same group of people together once again, each of them in different ways plagued by sleep.
Sarah is narcoleptic, and her inability to distinguish between dreams and waking reality gives rise to a great many misunderstandings--one of which is to change Robert's life forever, as he persists for y
From the Back Cover
British acclaim for The House of Sleep
"Coe has been compared to Peacock, Waugh and Wodehouse. But this novel shows he has outgrown even this distinguished lineage . . . The House of Sleep plunges us from romance to tragedy, from film noir to farce . . . There are sublimely silly scenes, but there are also moments of exquisite pathos and beauty. This is a fiercely clever, witty novel, but it is also wise, generous and hopeful . . . [It] is a comic novel, but one has to reach deep into the canon to find a tradition muscular, humane and stormy enough to accommodate it."
--Trev Broughton, Times Literary Supplement
"Shows energy, tenderness, social commitment, all in a style that comes like breath. The writer is one of the very best contemporary British novelists, thrillingly original as well as accessible."
--Candia McWilliam, Independent on Sunday
"A serpentine novel of ideas . . . Packed with brilliant comic set- pieces, trenchant satire on the self-serving `business' of helping
people and dexterous plotting which lovingly exploits the thin line
between accident and design."
--John O'Connell, Time Out
"This is a topically intelligent and speculative novel for an age fascinated by consciousness and cognition . . . A book of playful games and combinations, written with great brio . . . It's also, as a worthy novel should be, a humane pleasure to read."
--Malcolm Bradbury, New Statesman
About the Author
Born in 1961, Jonathan Coe took degrees from Cambridge and Warwick universities. He lives in London.
