In sleep we all die, every one of us, every day. Why wasn’t that fact noted more often?
Nod by Adrian Barnes, p. 20.
Nod tells us of Paul, an author living in Vancouver, following the sudden and rapid onset of a global insomnia pandemic. In its’ wake Paul becomes a Sleeper: one of the rare individuals who is still able to sleep, still able to experience the feeling of being bone-tired. At the same time, Paul is forced to bear witness as his girlfriend, Tanya, starts to deteriorate under the weight of her restlessness. Later, she’ll be called one of the Awakened. And outside, hidden by the trees of a city park, live the newly-mute Sleeper children. As the world (or perhaps just the city?) order begins to shift dramatically, the now ever-silent children are relabelled Demons.
Paul has a deep interest in etymology, and this is integral to the storytelling in Nod. As the time the pandemic starts, he’s writing his latest book: also titled ‘Nod’. For Paul, ‘Nod’ was to be a piece on the history of ‘sidetracked… orphaned and deformed words.’ In the Bible, as Paul notes, Nod is ‘the barren nightmare land’ to which Cain was exiled by God after after murdering his brother, Abel. And yet it’s also the place where parents nudge their sleepy children to. Paul’s thesis is this: we abandon words when we forget them. But although they vanish from our vocabularies, the realities those words spoke to don’t: ‘… and when we hear those words… we feel a slight breeze, a chill presence we can’t quite identify.’ From this point onward, Barnes litters the pages with old words and phrases, and lends them to name each chapter.
After six days of absolute sleep deprivation, psychosis will set in.
After four weeks, the body will die.
Within days of the pandemic’s onset, running water and electricity cease. Hospitals are overrun. Parking lots become gun ranges. In the streets of Vancouver, below Paul and Tanya’s apartment, chaos and lawlessness spread without bounds. Quickly, this leads to the rise of a cult-like group, of very unexpected origins, that has a deep and pervasive interest in Paul. Soon, he finds himself caught up in a world of sickly yellow paint, blue admirals, and rabbit hunts. He is forced to count down the days, waiting out the Awakened’s inevitable demise, and whatever will remain thereafter.
Barnes’ Nod is an incredibly well-told story that plainly sets out out the graphic, ugly truth of a society collapsing at breakneck speed. Although I wish there was more depth to some parts of the story, namely the mysterious, golden-hued dream Paul and other Sleepers experience, or the origins (and later, endings) of the surprisingly well-organised Cat Sleepers, who feign sleep, I found myself quite attached to Paul and Tanya, hoping that somehow there was a way out of their predicament. Spoiler: there isn’t.
All in all, Nod felt like something of a profound read. I’ll admit it relies heavily on Paul’s affinity for the definitions of words over time, meaning any reader might need to Google a definition at some point (I certainly did) but this was still an enjoyable read. And here, enjoyable means that at times it provoked this odd, distinct heavy feeling in my chest. When a throat is slit, or a skull cracked, or a prisoner chained to a post, there is a little humanity lost in the pages of this one. Yet through it all, Paul retains a simple hopefulness (I wouldn’t even call it optimism) for what’s left of his city, his world, and his species. If you’re looking for a semi-thriller with a dark and dystopian setting, Nod is probably the book you’re after.
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