Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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23 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Huge, grey and imposing..., 4 Jul 2004
"Huge, grey and imposing": the three adjectives appear two-thirds of the way down the opening page of Jonathan Coe's fifth novel, introducing the story's main setting, a house shared by a group of university students, in some indeterminate location on the English coast. Twenty-three pages later, those same words reappear, introducing an identical description of the same house, now the house of sleep of the title, a private clinic treating patients suffering from various sleep-disorders. The narrative has now moved forward some twelve years, the original student inhabitants have moved on - although most of them, in various guises, will be back... From there on the novel, in alternating chapters, moves backwards and forwards between undergraduate days in the eighties and "post-undergraduate" days - in many respects post-innocence days - in the mid-nineties.
There is equally something huge and imposing about the novel itself, which I have just reread in the space of an afternoon. Its atmosphere is from the start uncomfortably sinister; whereas other reviewers have tended to insist on the comic elements of the story, it should also be pointed out that the characters are, each in his or her own private way, both unhappy and unstable. And the novel's undoubted strength lies in the way it draws the reader inside these different versions of unhappiness and instability, forcing him or her to question the very nature of identity, and also to ask to what extent we can - or should - attempt to change it.
The novel is also grey - though not in any conventionally negative way. Dealing not only with the nature of dreams, the narrative also examines those awkward, Proustian grey areas between the conscious and unconscious minds. In the case of one character, Sarah, whose dreams are so vivid that she can no longer reliably distinguish between the things she has said and done and those she has only dreamt about, the nature of reality itself is tantalisingly questioned.
And yet Jonathan Coe's novel is not one of those postmodernist works like Auster's "New York Trilogy" in which the narratological pyrotechnics are such that the actual story-line - assuming there is one - becomes an irrelevant detail. Coe's non-linear complexity is complexity in the best tradition of "Wuthering Heights". And I defy any sensitive reader not to sprout a few goose-pimples when he reaches the overwhelmingly moving conclusion to what is, again like "Wuthering Heights", one of the most hauntingly unconventional of love-stories.
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Forget sleep - read this book all night!, 3 May 2003
This is simply such an impressive book.Coe writes about the one thing from which nobody can escape, and which nobody really talks about, and manages to put it at the centre of every character's life. All of his astonishingly vivid and separate characters - from the imaginative and solitary Terry to the disturbingly cold Dr Dudden - share sleep as something which changes their lives, and which eventually pushes them all back together, whether they like it or not. The book contains everything you need to keep you hooked through every waking and sleeping moment - familiar characters (you'll see yourself in at least one of them!), an interesting plot and subject, a beatifully lucid writing style and the most intricately woven relationships since Wuthering Heights. Each chapter inches the characters alternately further apart, and further together, as the book races effortlessly to the final lines. Coe is marvellous, and his book is a dream to read.
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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Some really dark moments, 23 Oct 2007
Brilliantly constructed follow-up to What a Carve Up! A group of students share a house in the early 1980s and despite their intense impact on one another they appear to go their separate ways. But things are not that simple and their paths will cross again. The whole book is suffused with theories of sleep and dreams which are in themselves fascinating even if we don't know how much of the information given has any real scientific background.
Alternate chapters recount the story from the 1980s and from June 1996. The student house becomes a private clinic specializing in sleep disorders run by the ghastly Gregory who was Sarah's sadistic lover in student days. Terry, a friend of Sarah's, arrives as a patient and is surprised that Gregory's assistant Cleo reminds him of Robert and wonders if she could be his sister.
Lots of very funny bits but with some really dark moments. The whole structure is all very cleverly worked out - it propels the reader (well, me anyway) along as you really want to know how everything turns out.
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