The House of Sleep
by Jonathan Coe
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan CoeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1999-04-27
ISBN: 0375700889
Number of pages: 352
Publisher: Vintage
Book Reviews of The House of Sleep
Book Review: You can build an intricate story from cataplexy, as it turns out
Summary: 4 Stars
This book has moments of humor that leap out of nowhere, catch you off guard, and elicit a chuckle. At the end of a book's worth of chuckles, Jonathan Coe's House of Sleep has accumulated a few honest-to-goodness belly laughs. Here's one of the earlier chuckles. We meet our doctor and his incoming insomniac at the sleep clinic where half the book takes place.
"`I notice one or two striking features of his report, however. For instance, you claim an average coffee consumption of between thirty to forty cups per day.'
`That's right.'
`Have you drunk any coffee since arriving here?'
`No. There doesn't seem to be any on the premises.'
`We only allow our patients to drink coffee as part of a controlled experiment, to see how it affects their sleep patterns. You went looking for some, then?'
`Yes.'
`And how do you feel, not having drunk any in the last ... nineteen hours?'
`Uncomfortable.'
`Thirty to forty cups a day seems rather excessive to me. Why do you drink so much?'
`It helps me to stay awake.'
`I see. That,' said Dr Dudden, `is a singular remark. Most insomniacs in my experience are looking for ways to help them sleep, not to stay awake.'"
It's very British, in the same way that a Scotland Yard detective happening upon a grisly murder scene -- bodies torn to shreds, limbs from one body entangled with those from another -- and nonchalantly asking, "What's all this, then?" is very British.
The story flips back and forth between the sleep clinic in 1996, and how it stood 12 years earlier. In 1984 it was a college dorm called Ashdown, filled with classic college students: artists who claim that they'll never let The Man get them down; shy, nerdy guys who can't talk to girls, and instead go to outlandish extremes to half-share their love (e.g., "You should really go look at page 170 of this particular book -- Our Special Book; it contains a special poem that is Totally Not About You...you know, if you want to go read it; no pressure"); women experimenting with their sexuality right up until graduation; etc.
By 1996 it is filled with people experiencing bizarre sleep disorders, and the bizarre doctors who love them. A fascinating creature, Sarah, nods off when she shouldn't, and goes cataplectic if she laughs too uproariously. She's been doing this since her undergraduate days; back then, everyone just assumed that she was reacting to alcohol a bit more intensely than they. During her bouts of cataplexy, her waking life bleeds into her dreaming life: she thinks people tell her things that they haven't, and she does things that she doesn't remember later. This makes Sarah, as you might imagine, much the most interesting character in House of Sleep.
Terry, our coffee-drinking friend, is amusing as well. As an undergraduate in Ashdown, he needed to sleep 14 hours a day. In fact he couldn't wait to sleep: his dreams were vivid and fantastic, sexual and intellectual, and he couldn't remember a moment of them upon waking. Just so you don't believe that this book is only about its characters' bedtime habits, you should know that Terry fills a couple other undergraduate types: the film snob and the academic. He gets obsessed with a particular Italian film that few have seen; those who have seen it find themselves wishing they hadn't, and do strange things like run off to monasteries to take lifelong vows of silence. No one even wants to admit to this film's existence, yet Terry goes to the ends of the earth to find individual frames from it.
Everyone winds up back at the former Ashdown eventually, or their lives tied to it somehow. Jonathan Coe expertly plays out a few inches of line at a time to the reader: how did our sleepy, dreamy film snob become the insomniac-by-choice? How did Ashdown, for that matter, turn into a sleep clinic? Where did our lovelorn poet end up? And doesn't Sarah's half-dreaming, half-waking life seem like it would give rise to ... interesting situations? (Hint: it does.)
House of Sleep is best thought of as a mystery novel riding on a clever conceit; you can do a lot with funny sleep disorders and the funny people experiencing them. Jonathan Coe builds an engrossing story from memories-that-aren't.
Summary of The House of Sleep
Winner of the Writers' Guild Best Fiction Award in England and the Prix Médicis in FranceLike a surreal and highly caffeinated version of The Big Chill, Jonathan Coe's new novel follows four students who knew each other in college in the eighties. Sarah is a narcoleptic who has dreams so vivid she mistakes them for real events. Robert has his life changed forever by the misunderstandings that arise from her condition. Terry spends his wakeful nights fueling his obsession with movies. And an increasingly unstable doctor, Gregory, sees sleep as a life-shortening disease which he must eradicate.
But after ten years of fretful slumber and dreams gone bad, the four reunite in their college town to confront their disorders. In a Gothic cliffside manor being used as a clinic for sleep disorders, they discover that neither love, nor lunacy, nor obsession ever rests.
The House of Sleep is an intricate cat's cradle of a novel, full of both sly satire and oblique meditations on the interstices of love, sleep, memory, and dreams. The setting is Ashdown, a wind-swept old house by the sea that once provided university housing and now is home to a clinic for sleep disorders. During the early 1980s, a group of students meet here, united by little other than a curious preoccupation with sleep. They include Sarah, a narcoleptic who has trouble distinguishing her intensely vivid dreams from reality; her first boyfriend, the fussy egomaniac Gregory, who gets his kicks from pressing his fingers on Sarah's closed eyes; Terry, a film buff who sleeps at least 14 hours a day, dreaming blissful dreams he can never quite remember; and the sensitive Robert, who loves Sarah enough to do anything at all in order to have her. By a series of startling coincidences, the four are drawn back to Ashdown 12 years later, setting into motion a plot so carefully contrived it makes most thrillers look spare and impressionistic. Like a dream, The House of Sleep resonates with repeated images, phrases, even passages; here they serve as narrative glue for a complicated story that moves backward and forward in time and in and out of different points of view. The result is sometimes puzzling, always absorbing, and often very funny indeed.
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