Rating: 
Summary: Garland succeeds again!
Review: A man sits by himself on a subway and watches a group of teenagers harass a woman and try to steal her purse. She gets away from them and moves closer, sitting down next to the men. The teenagers follow and try again to grab the woman's purse. This time the man stands up, raises his arm, and says "Hey". What follows is the man being struck, knocked down, and kicked until he is unconscious. This is the starting point of Alex Garland's third novel "The Coma".
The man (he remains unnamed throughout the novel) is released fairly quickly from the hospital and returns home. He tries, cautiously, to enter back into his life, but he begins noticing strange jumps in time and a selective amnesia. Acquaintances tell them man that they don't know something because the man doesn't know it either. Things do not add up or make sense to the man and he knows he has to return to the hospital. He is still in the coma, and these episodes are his coma dreams.
"The Coma" is a short novel, with less than 200 pages. This brevity gives rise to added tension in the story as Garland is able to build the narrative in little chunks that feel like movie scenes. We feel the jumps in the narrative, these confusing dreams as the man tries to figure out what happened to him, where he is, and how to get back to life. We feel the man's confusion in not knowing what is a coma dream and what is reality. Garland's technique is very effective.
Reading "The Coma" is trying to decipher the man's memories and take the man's journey through his unconscious. In the coma dream something is real only if the man can remember it. There is no rhyme or reason to what he remembers and why he remembers what he does, but isn't that how memory? Alex Garland takes the reader on a eerie trip through a man's unconscious and coma ridden dreams, and in the process tells a very interesting (and slightly creepy) story.
Garland is the author of the novels "The Beach" and "The Tesseract" and also wrote the screenplay for the zombie horror film "28 Days Later." His fiction is something to be anticipated and thus far it has not disappointed, though it is never what is expected.
-Joe Sherry
Rating: 
Summary: Solid but too short.
Review: Alex Garland is the man I consider the msot gifted writer of this generation. The Beach was probably the greatest book of the last 20 years (the horrible movie shouldn't keep you away from it), The Tesseract is a mastery of penmanship and the weaving of a story, and 28 Days Later brought the zombie genre back to the big screen... where every movie since 28DL hasn't even come close to it.
So when I got The Coma, I had high expectations. I read through it quickly and at the end I was happy with it but also a bit let down. It has some great writing and it's a very interesting literary take on the world inside the head of a coma victim, but all in all it lacks the depth you expect from Garland. It's also just too short. It's 200pgs, sure, but it has a large font, looks to be double spaced, and about 50 of those pages are taken up by his father's (absolutely wonderful) woodcuts showing scenes from the book.
It would've been better if this was released in a collection of short stories from Garland, rather than attempting to stand on it's own.
I liked it quite a bit, and any Garland fan will, but beware, if you're looking for a "deeper meaning" or want a novel, this isn't it.
Rating:
Summary: Incredible
Review: I have read several reviews on The Coma by Alex Garland, many of which were negative. I have now read two of Garland's three books and i love this man's talent at putting the reader in the story with his narrator. The Coma is an excellent and original story that extends beyond the range of normal human thinking into a dream world that Garland creates flawlessly. In previous reviews I have read how this book was uninteresting and boring. Although these are just opinions, I believe that in order to like this book the reader must be interested in thinking in extreme depths as Garland clearly does in this story.
Rating: 
Summary: An Hour to Kill
Review: I loved all of Garland's previous work, from "The Beach" to "The Tesseract" to his creepy story "R.S.S." in "The Weekenders" anthology and his script for the film "28 Days Later" -- but this was a severe disappointment. The idea at work is hardly original, the execution of it is mostly tepid, and the overall effect is reminiscent of being the only sober person in basement of stoned teenagers discussing consciousness. The line between dream life and reality is a recurring theme in Garland's work -- in "The Beach" there was the dead man popping up to "talk" to the protagonist, in "The Tesseract" there was the researcher recording the dreams of two street urchins, and "28 Days Later" begins with a man waking from a coma and trying to figure out if he was actually awake and in the "real" world. In this latest work, we meet a man who tries to intervene with a group of teenagers harassing a woman on the subway, only to get his head kicked in and end up in a coma (if nothing else, reading the book will put a damper on one's instinct to stick up for the innocent).
The primary force driving the narrative is the man's quest to unravel his own identity and wake himself up from his coma. The reader is taken down paths which, just like dreams, are somewhat askew and surreal. These are occasionally interesting, such as a bookstore in which the classics have been reduced to their single most famous line, or the record store selling albums where the lyrics are slightly wrong. However, midway through, Garland comes right out and says that it's impossible to represent the strange state of dream consciousness using the written word. That's pretty much a given, but one wishes it could have been a little more interesting. The man becomes obsessed with locating his briefcase, which he believes will contain something that will give him a hint of who is, and thereby allow him to wake himself up. At the end of the book, this finally does happen, but the result is something most readers will have guessed at -- especially if they have watched more than a few episodes of The Twilight Zone.
Is Garland a good writer? Certainly. But here he seems to be indulging in an idea mainly of interest to him, and it never really carries much weight. It's reads as if he was striving for a Camusesque novella and falls far short. Speaking of short... this book took me just barely over an hour to read. It's copiously illustrated with evocative simple woodcuts by Garland's father, and the designer has done yeoman's work padding the leading and margins to arrive at the hugely inflated page count. There are much better (and longer) books written from within the coma patient's head, two recent ones that come to mind are Irvine Welsh's "Marabou Stork Nightmares" and the book that influenced it, Iain Banks' "The Bridge."
Rating: 
Summary: Needs some salt
Review: I must tell you that when I originally read the description I was intrigued, it was and still is an good concept. Garland however failed to pull it off. I wasn't too terribly interesting, other than the book store scene, and the childhood home scene. Read it in an hour, won't read it again, thinking about selling it to the used book store, but it looks cool on my shelf. Oh and it does have a cool look with nice interesting art work.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting but underwhelming
Review: I think the premise here is very interesting. The writing is fine. The execution and the story? A bit underwhelming. It's not that it's flat out boring, so much as it seems like there is so much more that could have been done here.
I wonder what someone like Jonathan Carroll could have done with this material and I think that would have been a much better,
weirder, thoughtful, more-going-on-than-you-think kind of book.
This is a good book to check out at the library, read in a day, return and then probably forget about.
Rating:
Summary: Ponderous
Review: I was a big fan of Mr. Garland's debut novel "The Beach," less so of "The Tesseract," and while I was entertained by his latest effort, I can't say it compares favorably to the narrative drive and thrill of his first book. "The Coma" is essentially a short story interspersed with some interesting wood cut illustrations by his father that really serve little purpose beyond bulking up the page count. You keep turning the pages in hopes that some sort of narrative thread will be picked up, only to discover by book's end that you're more-or-less right back where you started with little illumination, and you'll be hard-pressed an hour later to even remember the characters' names.Still, Garland is a talented writer and I will keep buying his books in hopes that the next one will achieve the same literary heights as his debut.
Rating:
Summary: A Mad Trip Through (Un)Consciousness
Review: It had been a while since Alex Garland had published a novel. After The Beach and The Tesseract, Garland worked on the amazing horror flick 28 Days Later. The Coma, a short novella that is, like everything else Garland has written, not easily classifiable. This ends up being the novel's forte and also its biggest flaw. While trying to help a woman who is being attacked on a subway, Carl is beaten to a bloody pulp and left for dead. A long while later, he wakes up from the coma the attack left him in and returns home. But he soon realizes that nothing is as it used to be. Things have changed, things are wrong, things are just unexplainable. Time seems to be moving faster, Carl finds himself moving from one place to another without remembering having done so. And how about those invisible bleeding wounds on his body? Garland weaves his narrative just like a dream. One second we're standing in one place, the next we're in a total different setting. Things are disjointed and they don't always make sense for the reader. Until, that is, something crucial is revealed to us that changes the way we see or understand the events taking place in the narrative. Told in the first person over very short chapters, with interesting visual images to guide us through the story, The Coma is a story that is both imaginary and frighteningly real. As always, Garland lets his imagination run wild to create a one-of-a-kind trip to the human psyche. Then again, the book left me craving for more. I wanted more out of Carl, wanted to learn more from the characters and the situations they were in. Over the course of two very short chapters, Garland tells us a bit about Carl's childhood, but not enough to eradicate my curiosity. Some sections could have been fleshed out a bit more. It's rare that you'll want more out of a story. These days, most book should listen to the 'less is more' rule. But The Coma is an exception to the rule. As it stands, The Coma is a very fast read that you'll probably want to read again. An original read that will leave you craving for more.
Rating:
Summary: Disturbing, nightmarish and brilliant
Review: It would be a real shame if the inept movie version of "The Beach" were to keep anyone from picking up Alex Garland's latest. "The Coma" is a real masterpiece, and like "The Tesseract" goes far beyond the budding promise of "The Beach" to show a genuine talent at work. "Coma" seems to be a straightforward tale of a man's recovery from a severe beating, but from the first eerily flat descriptions of violence through dreamscape after dreamscape, the reader is brought to increasingly disturbing place. The woodcuts add brilliantly to the atmosphere, at their most effective at their simplest: slashes of white or shadows with no faces. Garland's ability to put the reader inside another's conciousness is reminiscent of masters like Dostoevsky. Please, purge your mind of the vision of Leo DiCaprio in warpaint and get this book.
Rating:
Summary: THIS is weapons-grade writing, folks.
Review: the folks who knocked this book are missing the point. (so the protagonist doesnt have a name? man, use your imagination!) this is a story told from a first person point of view, yes, but it is also a non-linear point of view, looking through different states of consciousness. if you've ever tried waking up from an especially potent dream and then trying to make sense of it and write it down before it slips away from you, reading this book is like reading a dream journal written with perfect recall. Garland has STYLE in the grandest sense, a prose constructed of simple language but with an ease of description rare in contemporary fiction. It reads as effortless, but it isn't, it is VERY difficult to craft language in this fashion. Garland is a powerhouse, and the reviewers here who found this "boring" didn't read this book correctly. This is something different from the John Grishams and the Stephen Kings, and thank God. By the way, I want to ask anyone who loved this book who thinks they know....what was in the briefcase? (answer here in this review column, I'll check back.)
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