Swift journey through a troubled consciousness

On the hipster meter, British writer Alex Garland rates high. His dark 1997 novel “The Beach,” compared by critics to “Lord of the Flies,” was made into a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio. His second novel, “The Tesseract,” mined similarly mysterious and ominous territory, as did his original screenplay for the post-apocalyptic film “28 Days Later.” What is a person to do when he slams up against the limits of human compassion, his work seems to ask. What lurks in the souls of men? It is these kinds of philosophical, existential questions, now directed at the idea of human consciousness, that form the heart of his newest novel, “The Coma.”

In concise, almost cryptic prose, Garland tells the story of Carl, a young Londoner who works late into the night before catching the subway home. En route, he’s beaten up by a group of teens and falls into a coma. Carl narrates the remainder of the novel from inside his own head as he struggles with issues of perception and awareness.

Emerging from the coma, Carl finds himself entering a “state of rolling hallucination,” appearing at a friend’s house in the middle of the night with no idea how he got there, worrying that he’s having a breakdown. He must have suffered some kind of brain damage, he concludes. “Which, to look on the bright side, might be reversible. Even, in some ways, easier to address than psychological trauma -- or at least more straightforward.” Eventually, Carl, like the reader, comes to understand that he’s still in the coma and experiencing in his dream state his desire to be restored to awareness. What can he do to pull himself back to genuine consciousness, he wonders, attempting various means of escape from the prison of his coma-bound mind, fluctuating between confidence and desperation.

“I had an idea: a layman’s guide to waking from a coma,” Carl ruminates, looking for the triggers and catalysts that will lift a sleeper out of unconsciousness. Music has always stirred him, so he goes to the record store in his dream and listens to a childhood favorite: Little Richard singing “Good Golly Miss Molly.” That doesn’t do it. He hails a taxi and searches for his childhood home, finding only a ramshackle shell of where he grew up. On the verge of waking, having finally located the dreamscape version of his parents, he overhears a conversation between a doctor and nurse in his hospital room and slips deeper into the coma state.

Ultimately, the book considers the elements that make up a person, tentatively concluding that consciousness may not be enough. “[I]f I were to lose an arm in an accident, I’d still be me.... Likewise with my legs, my sight, my hearing.... You could keep going ... until I was only a consciousness.” But take that away, and “Carl is no more.” Still, in his limited state, he’s not fully present either. “I was conscious, and that’s all. Beyond my consciousness, there wasn’t anything else.”

Garland writes like a screenwriter with short, tight bursts of details, and his chapters are structured like film clips -- quick and intense, often only a few paragraphs in length. His father, Nicholas Garland, a political cartoonist for London’s Daily Telegraph, supplies the woodcut illustrations that pepper the sparse text, reinforcing the sense that the novel is meant to be looked at as much as read.

In some ways, this type of novel may be heralding a change in how novels are written -- a way, one might argue, of bringing the narrative in line with the culture at large. We get the short, snappy pace of a film combined with the interior musing of a character, a narrative element that only novels traditionally offer. (The 2002 film “Adaptation,” with screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, would be an exception to this rule.) Unlike the novels of a century ago with their dignified bulk, “The Coma” can be read in the time it takes to see a film. This crossbreed offers the limitations and richness of both forms simultaneously.

Still, it seems that we hunger for novels and their inherent slowness for what they alone offer: a leisurely, accruing sense of depth and genuine understanding that comes from sitting patiently with characters and their predicaments. Though the express version may take us to the same location, we miss the ride.