The sleeve stays unravelled
Anita Brookner
THE HOUSE OF SLEEP by Jonathan Coe Ming £16.99, pp. 384 Jonathan Coe made a spectacular name for himself with his last novel, the marvel- lous What a Carve-Up!, which was awarded a prize by the French, presumably for con- firming their worst suspicions about the English. Many forms of greed and treach- ery were disclosed in a dazzling panorama of not quite farcical scams that ranged from high finance to low dealings on the farm. Needless to say, its successor has been awaited with more than usual inter- est. And it is the polar opposite of what the unsuspecting reader might have anticipat- ed. Extremely short on enraged chuckles or even sympathetic groans, it almost sleep- walks through its chosen subject, which is, appropriately enough, sleep disorder, and its effects on its sufferers, who remain unawakened as to its possibilities.
Those of us who spend our nights listening to the World Service will be slightly exasperated by this waste of precious material, as is Dr Dudden, who is an expert on sleep deprivation: his heroine is Mrs Thatcher, who can apparently man- age on a ration of four hours. Dr Dudden is barking mad, of course, but then so are many of his patients, not to mention those Who work for him. The similarity of Ash- down, his clinic, to quite another kind of institution is hardly fortuitous. But then it might be asked whether his patients, all mildly disordered, could have found their way unassisted to a slightly more orthodox form of therapy. They end badly: suicide, Coma, sex change, general bewilderment. A gross mismanagement of resources, as Dr Dudden would say, but only if he were still lucid.
Ashdown was once a university hall of residence, a large grey house somewhere on the coast. As students, Gregory, Sarah, Robert, Terry, and Veronica all met and fell in and out of love there in the early 1980s. None was remarkable at the time, except for Sarah, who suffered from nar- colepsy, a tendency to fall asleep at odd Moments, and also to dream in a manner indistinguishable from reality. She also suf- fered from cataplexy, so that a siege of emotion, even of laughter, would send her into a state of semi-consciousness and thus disrupt her normal life. Terry was only interested in films, and the parallel between dreams and films is painstakingly, and, on the last page, triumphantly estab- lished. Robert was in love with Sarah, Sarah was in love with Veronica, and Gregory was passionately attached to Sarah's eyelids. So far, so almost reassur- ing.
But then we are precipitated into the present day, as if we, the readers, have been asleep, and matters become confus- ing. Students return to Ashdown, either momentarily or as patients: they have memories which are in fact screen memo- ries, or, more importantly, memories based on misconceptions. They hold down jobs, somehow, and are in control, just. It takes a child, or rather a former child, to supply a pointer to their destinies, but through the medium of her own sleep: she babbles in disjointed sentences which join up with what has gone before, so that the novel ends with what seems like a grunt of relief on the part of both author and reader alike.
This is a case in which the premise — dysfunction — is more interesting than its execution, which is almost pedestrian, apart from a glorious seminar in which psychia- trists and business consultants are con- joined, and in which role-playing, complete with funny hats, is presumed to lead on to more efficient patient management. Here the writing becomes imperturbable, as if to demonstrate that any amount of imperfect sleep is more valuable than the games played when the subject is fully conscious. Echoes of Buiiuel and Georges Bataille can be heard in the narrative, which is sup- posed to represent the different stages of sleep: this is slightly misleading, as the sleeper, of necessity, inhabits a different world from the world interpreted by electroencephalograms. There is even a certain melancholy as events unfold. Were Dr Dudden not so obviously round the bend, he might be said to be investigating a very real phenomenon, or rather set of phenomena; unfortunately, his lack of expertise awakens real anxiety in the reader, who must persevere, even if at some stage narcolepsy threatens.
This highly distinctive author has chosen a subject which is almost too big for his novel: that is what makes The House of Sleep so unusual. When the phenomena of disturbed consciousness (of which, inciden- tally, no one seems aware) develop into psychic phenomena, one longs for an authoritative voice, possibly that of a psy- chiatrist not wearing a funny hat, to lead the reader back to ordinary wakefulness. It is all quite splendidly disturbing: a not quite sober, not quite candid examination of a process we are all obliged to undergo nightly, with results, it is to be hoped, less dire than those disclosed in the final pages.
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