#Titanuary #BookReview ‘Nod’ by Adrian Barnes

About the book…

Dawn breaks over Vancouver and no one in the world has slept the night before, or almost no one. A few people, perhaps one in ten thousand, can still sleep, and they’ve all shared the same golden dream.

After six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis will set in. After four weeks, the body will die. In the interim, panic ensues and a bizarre new world arises in which those previously on the fringes of society take the lead.

Paul, a writer, continues to sleep while his partner Tanya disintegrates before his eyes, and the new world swallows the old one whole.

First published by Titan in 2015 in both paperback and ebook editions, ‘Nod’ is , incredibly sadly, the only book that Adrian Barnes wrote before his death of brain cancer in 2018.

“In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn’t that fact noted more often? When we doze off each night there’s never the slightest guarantee that we’ll wake the next morning. Every little cat nap is a potential game-ender. So why fear death when we are happy and even eager to make that leap of faith each and every night of our lives?”

A dystopian nightmare which plays into the sleep deprivation which affects more Britons than any other population in the world, this is a book which will, with no trace of irony, give you broken nights.

It’s the constant source of conversation for us nurses, ‘did you have enough sleep?’, ‘How are you feeling after night shifts?’ and so on, and the same thing we ask of our patients as we grade our ability to interact, empathise and treat our fellow humans based upon our nocturnal habits. It doesn’t take long for lack of sleep to affect fine motor skills, ability to judge situations , communication and cognitive processes.

So in a world where whole swathes of people are suddenly afflicted by the lack of sleep, those who are able to drop off and rouse themselves next morning become outcasts or pariahs.

This is what happens to protagonist Paul, whose novel on the entymology of words related to the biblical land of ‘Nod’ is the line between him being a prophet or a world ender, and who can fall asleep and get up the next day. This ability is much to the chagrin of partner,Tanya, and their friends who begin to view Paul with something approximating envy AND anger.

The world descends into a state of disorder and chaos as the lines between asleep and awake blur. To hand yourself over to the ‘land of nod’ is to leave yourself vulnerable to attack. In  a dystopian world, so many things are seen as valuable skills, for example, being able to defend yourself, grow food etc. Never did I think I would be so scared of losing the ability to sleep. ‘Nod‘ is a true tour de force of speculative fiction,it posits the notion that we willingly surrender our conscious mind to relaxation, but in doing so , this makes us so vulnerable and alone. No matter how much you love someone, and share your life with them, when they are asleep they are completely unreachable and inside their own version of reality. How scary is that? The trope that drives so many romantic movies and stories, watching your partner asleep, is actually quite a terrifying one.

What an absolute mind melting read that left me questioning,thinking and feeling incredibly sad that Adrian only got to publish this one book.

But what a book it is.

About the author…

I was born in England but grew up in Canada buried in suffocating suburbia, which made me angry and fueled my flight, first to the city and then to the bucolic rural climes of the West Kootenay region of British Columbia where people mostly live like human people. I teach English and Creative Writing at Selkirk College and own and operate a chain of online newspapers. I also write novels. For kicks.