Rating: 5/5
Review:
Very good indeed
I thought The Dreamers was excellent. It’s a little hard to put my
finger on exactly why, but I found it wholly involving, very
thoughtful and genuinely touching in places.
A mystery illness
begins to spread through a college campus in a remote California
town. People fall asleep and, although they are obviously dreaming,
they simply can’t be woken and the illness spreads quickly, causing
national worry. The story sounds like a tediously familiar old
trope, but Karen Thompson Walker makes it fresh and original. She
does this partly by giving us the stories of a variety of characters
affected in one way or another by the illness, which she does
beautifully. These are recognisable people with recognisable
emotions and responses, and Thompson Walker paints them beautifully.
She catches the small, everyday events and internal responses which
so define a life and a person so that I became very involved with
each one of them.
Her other great
strength is her style. Her prose is beautifully poised; it is
unflashy but has a poetic rhythm to it and the whole book seems to
have a quiet, almost soothing pulse to it, even when describing
extreme events. This antithesis of the normal style of catastrophe
fiction is extraordinarily effective and for me gave these events a
far greater poignancy. It is just a pleasure to read.
As to what it’s
actually about...well, it’s hard to be precise, but it’s
important. Thompson Walker has things to say about the human
condition, the wondrous complexity of the physical world and of the
mind, the haphazard nature of existence and about what reality may be
to a human consciousness. There are many fine, affecting stories
here but one in particular about a “Dreamer” who is pregnant
comes to a conclusion which I found truly moving and very
thought-provoking.
I’m struggling to
express clearly why I liked The Dreamers so much, but I did. I can
recommend it very warmly indeed.
(My thanks to
Scribner UK for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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