One day, without explanation, everyone on Earth loses the ability to
sleep. Everyone, that is, except a select few, perhaps one in a
thousand, who still can recharge their bodies and minds. Paul, a writer
of books on etymology, is one such lucky soul. Tanya, his girlfriend, is
not. In a maximum of four weeks, the Awakened will die, their bodies
and brains taxed to the maximum. But before that happens, civilization
will collapse and millions of people who start to get very desperate,
erratic, and insane. Paul finds that his latest, unpublished work, Nod,
has fallen into the hands of a charismatic nutcase who leads a band of
followers, and he tries to navigate a tricky line between placating the
horde who see him as a prophet and saying the wrong thing and being
martyred by madmen. And then there's the tricky problem of the children
he wants to save...
This is a wonderfully eerie apocalyptic
nightmare scenario. It's such a simple idea, but so open to horrible
possibilities. A world of brainless zombies is one thing; a world of
cunning, crazed, sleep-deprived iconoclasts, jealous and suspicious of
your ability to sleep, is something rather more frightening. At least
you know where you stand with zombies. The book is a quick read, with a
taut, heavy atmosphere of dread, and depictions of real cruelty,
leavened slightly by Paul's expounding on interesting old words and
ruminations about what life, in the regular old world, was really about.
Barnes isn't interested in "hard science fiction" ideas about what in
reality cause such a doomsday scenario or why some might be unaffected;
this is more in the way of speculative apocalyptic horror with an
faintly optimistic outlook. Sadly, Barnes died of a rare cancer right
after publishing this book, so we'll never know what other gems he might
have written.
four stars
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