After reading The Coma, I think I have decided that Alex Garland is the book worlds equivalent of a one hit wonder. His first novel, The Beach, was quite the intriguing piece of travel fiction that did not fall into the Kerouac or Thompson trap of being arrogant and poorly written. Although I do not think it is going to age well even ten or twenty years from now, since it relies heavily on an attitude and culture that was very brief and did not have a high shelf life, I found some honest feeling in it and really thought its narrative drive made up for some of the goofiness, but I truly enjoyed it found the reading experience memorable. Then I read his second novel, The Tesseract, and while it was not very bad, it was quite the forgettable book, one whose plot and characters I had forgotten about not even a week after finishing it. And I regretfully have to say the same thing with his third novel, The Coma, which falls into the same trap as The Tesseract. A man is severely beaten and wakes up from a coma, but has experiences and time lapse he cannot explain, and begins to think if his comatose state is really over. It really has all the same problems as his previous novel. It is too experimental and filled with too many vague details for someone whose main strengths are narrative drive and high-octane action. It makes the reading a bit tedious, even though it took me less than an hour (all together through separate reading sessions) to finish. That is the upside is you will finish this quickly. It is not just me who can; it has pictures and text that is big and spaced enough that it takes you no more than 30 seconds a page. It is a quick read, but not a good one.
Rating: 3/5
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