Product Description

From the internationally-known author of The Beach, a gripping mystery and stylistic tour de force that delves into the subconscious mind, with brilliantly disturbing results. A young man is brutally assaulted late at night in an underground train by a gang of thugs. Beaten unconscious, he lies for days in a hospital bed - but appears to make a full recovery. On discharge from hospital, Carl picks up the threads of his daily life, visiting friends, seeing his girlfriend - until he starts to notice strange leaps in his perception of time, distortions in his experience. Is he truly reacting with the outside world, or might he be terribly mistaken? So begins a dark psychological drama that raises profound questions about the boundary between the real and the imagined.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #785309 in Books
• Published on: 2004-07-29
• Format: Audiobook
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 3
• Binding: Audio CD

Zembla
'The Coma may be short, but it's a miniature masterpiece: a beautifully conceived and executed book.'

Glamour
'This is Garland at his best, spinning a tangled web that has more twists and turns than a mountain road.'

Design Week
'It's a great story to read, but also a lovely visual object to possess.'

Customer Reviews

Garland strikes again!
A man sits by himself on a subway and watches a group of teenagers harass a woman and try to steal her purse. She gets away from them and moves closer, sitting down next to the men. The teenagers follow and try again to grab the woman's purse. This time the man stands up, raises his arm, and says "Hey". What follows is the man being struck, knocked down, and kicked until he is unconscious. This is the starting point of Alex Garland's third novel "The Coma".

The man (he remains unnamed throughout the novel) is released fairly quickly from the hospital and returns home. He tries, cautiously, to enter back into his life, but he begins noticing strange jumps in time and a selective amnesia. Acquaintances tell them man that they don't know something because the man doesn't know it either. Things do not add up or make sense to the man and he knows he has to return to the hospital. He is still in the coma, and these episodes are his coma dreams.

"The Coma" is a short novel, with less than 200 pages. This brevity gives rise to added tension in the story as Garland is able to build the narrative in little chunks that feel like movie scenes. We feel the jumps in the narrative, these confusing dreams as the man tries to figure out what happened to him, where he is, and how to get back to life. We feel the man's confusion in not knowing what is a coma dream and what is reality. Garland's technique is very effective.

Reading "The Coma" is trying to decipher the man's memories and take the man's journey through his unconscious. In the coma dream something is real only if the man can remember it. There is no rhyme or reason to what he remembers and why he remembers what he does, but isn't that how memory? Alex Garland takes the reader on a eerie trip through a man's unconscious and coma ridden dreams, and in the process tells a very interesting (and slightly creepy) story.

Garland is the author of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract" and also wrote the screenplay for the zombie horror film "28 Days Later." His fiction is something to be anticipated and thus far it has not disappointed, though it is never what is expected.

-Joe Sherry

Short, sharp and intelligent writing.
Don't get me wrong, I am a big fan of Alex Garland's work as an author. I thought the Beach was gritty but altogether inspired. The Tesseract was an interesting diversion away from the mainstream and the 28 days later script was both brutal and effective.

Therefore, my anticipation was very high when I heard of the author's new book "The Coma". What did I expect? I'm not really sure. Hopefully more of the same style as the Tesseract perhaps. What did I get? I will try and explain as best as I can.

"The Coma" is about a man, Carl, who, on trying to help a young woman out on the tube one night becomes the victim of a brutal assault by four teenagers. After that, Carl wakes up in a coma ward. Or does he? From here on I don't want to give too much away but basically the book continues to delve into the mind and surroundings of Carl. His thoughts, or real life situations, his trauma of not knowing whether his life is real or imagined and his determination to find out the truth is all explored here with both intelligence and humour.

The book itself is very short with many illustrations created by Nicholas Garland, the father of the author. The illustrations pick up on various places and images that Carl either remembers, is present at or conjures up, so they really do no damage to the flow of the book whatsoever. Although the chapters are short (some of them are less than half a page!) this makes it a comfortable read and even works in favour of the storyline as each chapter provides a glimpse at part of the real life, thoughts or memories of the central character which he himself is having trouble recollecting. This is why the book is so readable.

I would urge any Garland fan that enjoyed the Tesseract to give this book a go. You may think that by the size of the book and lack of full written pages that you have been ripped off, but I assure you that you're not. Altogether I was very impressed with the books style, flow and content and I hope that in the future Garland continues to write both intriguing and intelligent novels such as this.

The Coma, Alex Garland
I was looking forward to reading this book since the reviews I had read seemed to indicate that this is the sort of novel that you either love or hate.
It is definitely written in an interesting style, and the imagery Garland used is very effective. The description of the dream world is really good and conveys feelings more than real pictures. The 'plot' is also good and you will find yourself wondering whether Carl will or will not end up reaching his goal.
However, I must say I did feel cheated; each chapter is about 2 pages long, and some of them are only a few lines long. Also, considering that there is one illustration and at least one blank page between each chapter, the book is actually almost twice as small as what it looks like, and it took me only 45 minutes to finish it. The ending, I thought, was also a bit of a let down. Even though I do appreciate that it is appropriate for that sort of novel to have an elusive ending, this one made me feel like it would have beneficiated from being a bit more detailed.
All in all, a nice experience, but much too short.