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The House of Sleep
Jonathan Coe
Viking hardback, 341 pages, £16.99
Published May 1997
ISBN 0670864587
Review by Gerald Houghton (1997)

Jonathan Coe was always going to have a problem following What A Carve Up!, that whopping Dickensian tour de force and crafty indictment of the Thatcher regime that breathlessly climaxes in all-out farce. Sensibly, The House of Sleep doesn’t revisit past glories but still comes to us recognisably dipped in the same ink.

The intricacies of The House of Sleep, told mostly in alternate chapters set in 1983-4 and June 1996, are enough to render anyone sleepless. Huge and grey, Ashdown stands on a headland, beside a sheer cliff. In the mid-eighties it’s a student hall of residence. Sarah lives here with Gregory, who claimed her virginity and who, to her abject horror, insists on pawing her eyelids during sex. And here’s Terry, a film student who sleeps for 14 hours and spends his conscious hours pursuing neo-realist Salvatore Ortese’s lost 1972 ‘masterpiece’, Latrine Duty. Events turn when Sarah flees her lover’s tyranny, ending up not in the arms of heroically patient, leg-shaving drip Robert (who adores her) but the infinitely more provocative bed of friend Veronica.

Sleep is the key: Terry is its martyr; Sarah is narcoleptic. And when they leave for the wider world, it’s arch-Thatcherite Gregory Dudden who returns first, remodelling their sprawling digs as his own personal Frankensteinian clinic for the study of sleep disorders.

The remainder of this expansive book belongs to 1996. Sarah Tudor is the primary teacher whose vivid dreams she can no longer detach from reality. Now a chronic insomniac (film has replaced his dreams) Terry Worth is famed as the critic whose misnumbered footnotes shot down Frame magazine in a blaze of lawsuits from the Duke of Edinburgh, Cliff Richard and Norman Wisdom. And what of poor lovesick Robert? Now, thereby hangs a tale . . .

One has to respect Coe for keeping all these balls in the air. Like Chaos without stabilisers, these thirty-somethings unconsciously ricochet off one another in ever more confused and confusing figures. A lesser reporter could make it all seem clumsy and contrived, but in remaining only just out of focus, the switch between lyrical and comic is scarcely noticeable. Coe is more consummate storyteller than grammatical stylist, but that detracts not a jot from his talent.

Nor his comic genius. The novel has serious underpinnings about love and the value of art, but always with some marvellous, laugh-out-loud set pieces: Sarah muddling the death of Robert's cat with that of his sister, 'Well, he didn't like the way she used to pee on the sitting room carpet'; poetry homework usurped by Gangsta Rap, 'Listen up now, you dirty motherfucker.'

And House of Sleep's ending, as in What A Carve Up!, is both tragic and hopeful. This book has less bile but Coe can't help but lash out at management seminars, Thatcher, and the failing of institutionalised care.

Far from Coe’s originally-intended 'funny, short novella' about sleepwalking, The House of Sleep is sprawling, ambitious and utterly captivating. He makes us laugh and care at the same time, and spices it all with compelling secrets. Truly, the literary novel as sublime entertainment. •

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