“How did you know it was coming?”
That stumped me. Had I seen Nod coming? It was true that part of me had always remained outside the old world – a ghost with folded arms. I think I always suspected that some sort of fraud was being perpetuated as I watched ‘normal’ play out. Maybe I just expected more of life than it was ever realistically going to be able to deliver – maybe I was a romantic.
Real romantics are never the ones with the easy, winning ways about them; the real romantics are always the guarded ones, the paranoid and the worried, the ones with furrowed brows and coffee jitters. After all, anyone looking with open eyes at the world we’d made would have to have been very, very worried. (Nod, pp155-56)
Apocalypse seems to be in fashion at the moment. The end of the world is so much in vogue that writers and film directors are falling over themselves to come up with new and exciting ways to doom the planet. The end result is that we’ve been faced with some pretty silly scenarios recently, most of them zombie-related, many of them not worth our time. When I first read the synopsis of Adrian Barnes’s debut novel Nod – in which civilization is brought to a juddering halt when the global population becomes fatally psychotic through lack of sleep – I mentally rolled my eyes and breathed a silent ‘oh no.’ I couldn’t imagine how such a bizarre idea could be made to work, much less contribute anything substantial to the literature of universal destruction. I might not have read it at all, had it not been for the violently differing responses it began to elicit. Critics I admire and trust quickly aligned themselves more or less fifty-fifty either side of the love-it/hate-it axis. I became curious in the extreme, especially when the book scored valuable kudos for its publisher, Hebden Bridge-based indie Bluemoose Books, by graduating to the Clarke Award shortlist. How could I not want to read a novel that seemed to inspire devotion and dislike in equal measure?
I was eager to find out what I thought.
Let me announce my own allegiance straight away: I loved it. I was sold almost from the first page, because Nod turned out to be different in every respect from what I imagined it would be, and when it comes to new novels at least there’s nothing I enjoy more than being proved wrong.
One of the things the ‘hate-it’ critics seemed to dislike most about the novel was the voice of its narrator, Paul. While his wife Tanya works the corporate hamster wheel to bring in the money, Paul sits at home obsessing over obscure texts on etymology, writing books that he is finding increasingly difficult to get published. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there are readers who have judged Paul to be a heartless bastard: disaffected, cynical, grudging and selfishly malcontent. But I’m bound to admit that I found Paul’s excoriating brand of honesty brave and refreshing. He cuts to the chase, that’s all – and doesn’t give much of a damn what anyone around him has to say about that. What some have seen as Paul’s smug isolationism I read as barely contained fury at what he perceives as his own failures, his objectifying of Tanya as the desperate, staring-eyed consternation of a man who knows beyond all doubt that the person he loves is going to die, and there isn’t a single damned thing he can do to save her. Paul’s social commentary – devastating and ruthless though it is – is braver and more accurately aimed than most of anything you’ll find in the more poetically moderated mainstream. And cynical be damned. To my mind at least, Paul – see the quote above – is actually one of the romantics.
More often than not, I found myself being won over to Paul’s side. But the most surprising discovery I made about Nod was that it’s not really a future catastrophe novel at all – it’s a book about now.
Yes, there’s a story – quite a powerful one, actually – about the world ending. In the tradition of many great end-of-the-world narratives, a big thing begins with a small thing that rapidly snowballs. People can’t sleep, and without sleep people die, ergo the world is heading for total meltdown in just thirty days. There’s no known cause for this curious pandemic, no hope of finding a cure either, because only a tiny minority seem to be exempt from the condition and everyone else is spiralling downhill at the same ultra-rapid rate. In a remarkably short space of time, what passes for normality becomes a nonsense and finally a charnel house. A freaked-out navy man nukes Seattle. The lunatics have taken over the asylum, and the asylum is the world. But it seems clear from early on in the book that Barnes is not writing a zombie apocalypse at all, but an indictment of our soiled and congested present:
The television’s caffeinated universe kept unfolding. The flesh-draped skulls of the anchormen and women yammered, and their joke shop teeth chattered. And their eyes! You’d have to handle those twitching eyes carefully if you ever found them in the palms of your hot little hands; you’d have to fight the urge to squeeze their jelly till it squished between your fingers. The men and women on TV were brazen heads. Of Irish derivation, a brazen head was omniscient and told those who consulted it whatever they needed to know, past, present or future: ‘let there be a brazen head set in the middle of things… out of which cast flames of fire.’ Isn’t that television, exactly? In the middle of things, burning away? (Nod, pp13-14)
What Nod portrays, more than the hypothetical bizarre, is the everyday commonplace: the compulsive pursuit of needless information, the desperate rush to acquire superfluous things, the violent cycle of exploitation that is end-of-the-road capitalism. The novel’s narrative is a thread to hang this on, a deliberate hyperbole, an ironical rant. What Barnes seems to be saying, put most simply, is: ‘wake up!’ The best science fiction of Nod lies not in its depiction of an implausible catastrophe, but in its usage of the story tropes of apocalypse as metaphorical construct. Indeed, I found the best way of reading and understanding Nod was to see the entire narrative as one extended metaphor, one of Paul’s ‘lost’ words, or a new word even, struggling for expression.
The novel’s final paragraph acts as a rewind to now. More than showing us what has happened or warning us of what might happen in the future, it’s reminding us of all the things – through greed, through waste, through iniquity, through political ignorance, through sheer habitual passivity – we stand to lose in a present that is already unravelling.
And of course for Paul, for Barnes, for all of us what remains in the end are our stories, our ways of telling our lives that in their variousness maintain our integrity in the face of impossible opposition. If words cannot in the end save us from what must come, they can at least insist that we were here:
In these final hours, I meditate on the passing of Nod and – of course – on words. There’s more power in words than people think. How does the Bible begin? ‘In the beginning was the Word.’ Nod was the miracle of the undergraduate poet, the sensitive young person who discovers that he or she can combine adjectives and nouns higgledy piggledy and come up with all sorts of fantastic monsters: cowering towers, fierce slumber, panicky taxis, shy murderers, and the like. (Nod, p198)
The rashness, the impetuosity, the unevenness, the anger of Nod is what made this novel, for me at least, unexpectedly moving. Nod reads like a book that had to be written. To my mind, there are few better recommendations for reading anything.