The House of Sleep [Paperback]

"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.

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.

This really is a perfect novel; Coe's magnum opus - a proper landmark in fiction that deserves to be read, debated, studied and held in wonder. And no - I am not an associate of the author, just a huge fan of this book. I have just finished reading it for the third time. If you are thinking about buying this book you should believe all of the reviews that mention its "unputdownability".

To reveal the details of the plot would be a crime against those who have not read this book, but suffice to say that the style is breathtakingly easy, even as it accelerates towards its disturbing and emotionally tense climax.

Coe is to be praised for his attention to detail and the web of symbolism that he creates. Even the smallest detail is revealed to have deep significances that reverberate throughout the text in a complex (but not complicated) network of cause-and-effect. The book deconstructs narratives, challenges the assumed relationship between the conscious and unconscious mind, so psychologists beware. As for everyone else, you will simply never think of sleep in the same way. As E.A. Poe said:

"Sleep... those little slices of death. How I loathe them."...