The Coma

A Brief Book Review by Robert McEvily



With The Beach, which was turned into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, British novelist Alex Garland hit the big time. He was a then-under-30 author with good looks, great prose, and wonderful promise. His intelligent screenplay for 28 Days Later, an unsettling, entertaining freak-out, solidified his rep as a hip multi-talent. His talent now expands with The Coma.



Considering how much can go wrong with a premise of describing the thoughts of a comatose narrator, Garland's accomplishment here is exemplary. In addition to its fictional pleasures, The Coma reads as a metaphysical guidebook, a journey to the center of a soul. The author's father, artist Nicholas Garland, provides ominous illustrations to precede each chapter - a tasty touch.

Many passages, deep, and written in clipped, crisp language, give rise to dormant thoughts, and demand additional reads. An example…

If I were to lose an arm in an accident, I'd still be me. Nobody would say I wasn't me. They wouldn't say, He used to be Carl, then he lost an arm, and now he's John.

And if, in another accident, I lost the other arm, the same would be true. Likewise with my legs, my sight, my hearing, my speech, my sense of touch. You could keep going, keep stripping me down, until I was only a consciousness, suspended in a void.

But take away the consciousness, and suddenly I'm gone. Carl is no more. And take away the consciousness but leave the body, leave the full complement of arms and legs, and I'm still gone.

Before The Coma, Garland published The Tesseract, a novel which invited comparisons to Graham Greene. With Garland's current quality of work, it’s a safe bet certain up-and-comers will now be compared to him.