The principal characters in this bizarre and brilliant, tragicomic novel are afflicted with sleep disorders, sleeping too much or hardly at all, which sometimes confuse their conscious grasp of reality and complicate their relationships with each other and themselves.
Because of the onset of these abnormal difficulties, a group of men and women who lived together as students in a university residence in 1983-4 find themselves together again as patients twelve years later, when the house has become the Dudden Clinic. Dr Gregory Dudden, a psychologist, is a wonderful creation, as fanatical as Terry Southern's Dr Strangelove. Dudden believes his mission is to cure mankind of the need to sleep and thus to save the third of life usually wasted in unconsciousness. While his clinic is supposedly intended only to treat sufferers from insomnia, somniloquy, somnambulance, narcolepsy and cataplexy, Dudden is secretly conducting abominable experiments in a basement laboratory to discover how much sleep deprivation various creatures can tolerate. Coe's preposterous plot is contrived with great ingenuity, providing opportunities for satirical dissertations on film-making and serious instruction on building a sandcastle, as well as the gradual revelation of a bisexual love story.
