Coma chameleon

The Coma
by Alex Garland
Faber £9.99, pp160

It's ten years since Alex Garland started to write his first novel, The Beach. In some ways he has spent the decade confounding the expectations that the extraordinary success of that book placed upon him. He said he saw a pile of copies of it in a shop the other day 'and it was like seeing someone you used to know ages ago and are now trying to avoid'. He felt like turning away as if pretending they hadn't seen each other. 'I've got nothing particularly against the book,' he says, 'which has given me lots of opportunities, but I do feel very detached from it. It's ancient history for me. I started it when I was 24. It would be desperate to still be clinging on to it now.'

Publishers, predictably, have been more reluctant to let the bestseller go. Garland recalls how, after he wrote his second novel, The Tesseract, a far more complex and demanding narrative set in Manila, he was sat down by an editor in America who said: 'Look, Alex, your strength is young people, backpackers in search of Utopia. Get back to that. And this time, can you make the young people Americans?'

The great blessing of the success of The Beach, however, was that it enabled him to walk away from conversations like that one, to follow his own sense of what he wanted to be writing - or even decide if he wanted to be writing at all. Garland had become a novelist a bit by accident, The Beach had grown quickly out of a comic book he had been drawing, and suddenly it felt too much like a career choice.

'Because I'd never really wanted to be a writer I'd never felt fortunate about The Beach in any way other than like someone who won the lottery,' he says, when I talk to him about the supposed writer's block that has been ascribed to him in recent years. 'If you are asking were there times when I thought, "Fuck this, I've had enough of writing, I don't like the book world. I don't like most books, even. I don't like sitting on my own in a room for hours on end," then yes, there were loads of times like that.

'I often find writing a kind of irritating way to spend my one shot at life. I never felt short of things to write about. It was more to do with the will to write. I'd read stuff I'd written and think, "Who cares? I don't. Why should anyone else?"'

This process of harsh self-editing has resulted in an urgent and unsettling third book, The Coma, more of a novella than a novel, which is illustrated with woodcuts by Garland's father, Nicholas, the Telegraph cartoonist. The book describes the dream-like interior life of a man left permanently semi-conscious after being beaten up on a train. Its brevity, he says, is born out of need to make all of it count, not to try the patience of the reader; or indeed that of the author.

'It's a short read. It was always designed to be. I suspect it would not have worked had it been much longer. Those jumps in mental landscape get frustrating after a while. You need something to grip on to.'

The atmosphere of the book reminded me of reading Kafka, that sense of shifting alienation. He agrees that it was exactly that mood that he was trying to generate.

'Tonally, you'd have definitely read it before. If you've read Kazuo Ishiguro's The Unconsoled that has an element of it, too. I spent a lot of time wondering why dreams are so tricky in a narrative. There is something rather naff about talking about dreams. That in itself is something that pushed a button in me because it felt like a taboo or something.'

Garland is very good at recreating the virtual worlds of the half-awake and then subtly dissolving them. As his protagonist realises that he is only dreaming about recovery from his assault, he questions where his thinking self is located. The result is compelling and chilling.

'There is something about this area that is scary and central to how we think about ourselves,' Garland says. 'Children can understand and cope with the idea of dead and alive, but not this half-state. Most people in comas appear to smile and appear to react to things. They are not in this complete sleep state necessarily. But nobody knows what it is like. And I wanted to write something that could inhabit that space.'

His father's illustrations heighten the oddness. Garland was very keen to make the novel a collaborative effort, in part because he had enjoyed that experience when working on the screenplay for the film 28 Days later with Andrew Macdonald and Danny Boyle, who also directed the film of The Beach.

'I hung on to that idea of teamwork,' he says. 'And I knew if I was going to do a book that involved images then my dad would be the one I would work with. I've grown up watching him do these things every morning before he goes to the office, and I think the way he does woodcuts and linocuts very much influenced the way I write prose. I mean the heavy emphasis on craft with the aim of making things simple, hopefully deceptively so. I wrote about 30 pages of the thing and asked him if he was interested. And he liked the idea of the story.'

Even so, Garland says he had huge reservations about working so closely with his father. 'I said, "I will be completely unreasonable about things at times, in a very annoying way, and that may come as a shock." And he looked at me as if to say actually he knew that side of me rather well.'

A lot of that side of Garland seems to express itself on the page. If there is a theme running through his books it has to do with an obsessive kind of detachment from life, an anxiety about connection. He does not believe, though, that it is something he consciously seeks. 'I'm never anxious to explore anything in myself as such. A story just pushes a button. It's quite easy for me to see the connections though: a neutral male protagonist with no interest in telling a back story; well-meaning, flawed, trying to make sense of things.'

Garland has recently become a father, I wonder if this growing sense of domestication makes it harder for him to summon the disconnectedness that his books describe.

He smiles. 'No. One thing it does not seem hard for me to get in touch with is the strangeness of life. It's rather the opposite: I spend my time trying to reinforce the domestic, trying to prop it up.

'I don't seek oddness,' he says. 'But certainly I don't find oddness hard to locate.'

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