Just Finished Reading: Nod by Adrian Barnes (FP: 2015)

It was probably stress. Paul’s girlfriend Tanya usually slept like the dead but that night she tossed and turned. So it must have been something at the office. Or so he thought. But with her off to work with the distracted kiss Paul could get back to working on his book. He didn’t want to piss Tanya off by saying that he’d had his best night’s sleep in years beside her. Of course everything changed when she got back that evening. It was hard to tell what was more surprising – her news or the fact that Paul didn’t already know but he avoided the siren call of the Internet when he was working. So it was Tanya who told him that no one, at least all but a handful of people, across the entire world had slept the night before. Less than one in a thousand had managed to sleep normally. It was the talk of the world and the world’s talking heads debated it endlessly into the night. When it came time for bed Paul was probably as worried as Tanya looked. In the morning they knew – a world that hadn’t slept for two night running. This was not just a weird coincidence. No way. That’s when the panic buying started. On day three the army was on the streets guarding supermarkets. The frightening thing is just how tired the soldiers looked. Everyone was looking pretty haggard. Even Paul managed to look less with it than he felt. By day four and still no sleep the edge of panic was starting to creep into the world. Wild conspiracy theories abounded on the News and Online. The microwaves of the phone networks installed everywhere where the prime suspect so they were switched off and anyone seen carrying or using a cell phone had it removed and destroyed in front of them. On day five they cut the power. Then things started getting bad. Really bad….. Especially when you lived in a world of the Awakened and all you wanted was Sleep.

This was another of those random books I picked up from my favourite franchise book shop in one of their perennial offers. End of the World stories are probably one of my guilty pleasures. I think it’s the survival aspects I like the most - the idea that any normal day can be turned upside down in a moment by something massive and inexplicable like an asteroid impact of a zombie outbreak. Basically at the flick of a switch you have to survive with whatever you have in your pockets and whatever wits and knowledge you have. This wasn’t quite click of the fingers quick but the world – in this instance Vancouver in Canada – did fall apart in less than a week. Whether that’s realistic I don’t know. I do always struggle in these things at how quickly everything falls apart. I know it’s mostly for artistic reasons (to reduce the cast of characters to reasonable numbers) but I honestly don’t think that things would collapse with anything like the speed portrayed in most books, movies or TV shows. It’s just not realistic. Even without power things just wouldn’t collapse. They’d slump, there would be chaos and then we’d recover. After all if we could have global empires before electricity we can have them after too. But I digress.

This is an interesting single perspective novel. Everything is seen through the eyes of the author – Paul. Whenever things happen ‘off stage’ he either never knows what caused it or hears about it from those who did see/experience the event. It certainly makes things feel immediate and often claustrophobic. The other interesting thing is that most of the main players know that every one of the Awakened is essentially on a clock. Without sleep the body shuts down after about 4-6 weeks. Before that the brain starts to malfunction after a few days with memory loss, hallucinations and psychosis. Paul is essentially living through a transition from normality to a passable creation of Bruegel’s hell. It was, as you can imagine, quite disturbing in places. However, as an End of the World novel it is quite excellent. But being that genre there is a fair amount of death, destruction and all of the associated nastiness we humans are so good at. Not recommended for the faint of heart (especially at the moment) but definitely recommended for those made of sterner stuff.