Nod

Product Information

The cast-- save for the homeless guy nobody likes and a bunch of similarly flat characters who get, at most, one or two scenes apiece-- is rounded out by the protagonist's girlfriend. She, too, is terribly written. By the time she died (the protagonist slit her throat with a box cutter to Save Her From What The World Had Become and What Was Happening to Her), I'd stopped giving a damn. Meaning the ensuing half-a-chapter about how she and the protagonist had first met and what they were like together and blah blah blah was utterly pointless. Maybe if some attempt had been made to flesh her out before her pointless death-- aside from the offhand mention that her uncle had abused her as a child, which is brought up exactly once and promptly forgotten-- then maybe I would have cared for her as a character. As it was, I honestly didn't have any reason to. She was less godawful than the protagonist, but... honestly, that didn't much matter.

Nod takes place in Vancouver, Canada and follows the lives of Tanya and her husband Paul, an etymologist and writer, who is one of the rare Sleepers. Paul is the novel’s narrator. Early on in Nod, Tanya, an Awaker, desperate for sleep as anyone would be after several days of watching the moon make its slow crawl across the sky, demands sex from Paul, because she hopes that will get her to sleep. Tanya and Paul’s touching is coarse, brutal, and primitive, setting the stage for the rest of the novel. Violent, frightening, textured, and dystopian are words that aptly describe the short-lived world that Barnes has created. Barnes’ writing is beautiful” -Quest For Sleep I could see what the new world of Nod looked like, could easily picture the slow collapse of Vancouver and its people thanks to Barnes’ close attention to detail. At times I could even smell the death and decay it so vividly described.” -Project Fandom Yet the most endearing element comes from the death of a long term relationship between Paul (one of the few Sleepers - people who are able to maintain nightly sleep) and his is partner Tanya (one of the many Awakened, those in a perpetual state of insomnia). Their close bond pre the end of the world balances on the edge of ending before falling over the void into nothingness. Add cult-like theorists and an easy manipulation of will, and Tanya and Paul's life together was going to always take a turn for the worse. Not forgetting the fact that the Awakened have a vastly shortened life span as it is. Debut author Barnes has written a completely original twist on the subject of insomnia. His apocalyptic thriller will appeal to fans of Christopher Galt's Biblical and other dystopian and sf thrillers as well as readers with an interest in mythology" - Library JournalPlease bear in mind that this is my own point of view, and maybe other readers may find themselves enjoying Nod. My main issue with this book is that the author spent so much time using unnecessary words, that he failed to write anything interesting about what was actually going on. I don't usually quote from the books I'm reviewing but in this case it's necessary, "Charles loved big words, loved forcing them into his sentences no matter how much they squealed." Seriously? That sentence is probably the best description of Nod that I could ever come up with. Words just forced into sentences.

The effect was instantaneous. There isn’t much distance, once you’re forced to think about it, between a smile and a grimace of terror. Just two slightly different sets of facial contortions. On the street behind us, a hundred expressions shifted, and we all entered yet another hell. A man began to scream in a little girl voice while the skeleton woman dropped to her knees, still gazing upward, and began to deepen the wounds on her forearms with ragged fingernails. Within seconds, the rest had followed suit, falling to the ground and grovelling among the glass. Summary: Enter a world very much like our own, but in which the vast majority of people can no longer sleep. How long will it take society's fragile walls to crumble? Find out in this disturbing and well written dystopian novel. Nod works brilliantly on several levels; as a nerve-shredding horror, a timely cautionary tale, and a study of a man’s life being stripped away. --Sci-Fi Now Honestly, that's a solid setup. It was enough to convince me this novel was worth the price of admission. I thought I would love this book, as it has an absolutely incredible premise. A new day dawns in Vancouver, Canada, and it soon becomes apparent that almost no one in the world has slept. Only a handful of people have managed to sleep, and every one of them has had the same strange dream involving an odd golden light. Paul, our writer protagonist, is one of these 'Sleepers', and he is forced to watch as his girlfriend Tanya and almost everyone else around him begin to rapidly deteriorate and lose their minds.

Having made his literary point, the prose becomes more conventional as he gets on with the story. Hardly anybody in Vancouver can sleep. (Yes, Vancouver. Why not?). Our writer and children seem to be the only ones. Why? Who knows? I'm reminded of Day of the Triffids, where someone wakes up and everybody else is blind. There's a parallel with My name is Legion too. Triffids, Legion and Nod: three fine books and each one thin - conclude what you will. Every now and again a novel comes along that is so Completely original and captivating that it makes you gasp....well Nod is one of these!

There are so many factors in a dystopian novel that need to mesh for the book to work. The first is of course the concept. All the best science fiction has a great idea at its centre and Adrian Barnes' Nod certainly has this. The idea of getting no sleep will chime with anybody who has had a poor night sometime in their life. It is easy to imagine that after only a few days the thin veneer of society would start to crumble if you were so dog tired. The second half of this novel seemed to switch in direction and take the reader on a more abstract and fantastical journey. I continued to appreciate the gorgeously lyrical writing style, as well as the overall ingenuity, but I longed for a return to the somewhat simpler initial stages of the novel. There are some fantastic Dystopian Worlds to discover; try Sand by Hugh Howey or Railhead by Philip Reeve.Edit: RIP Adrian Barnes. I learned today that the author died early this year, succumbing to the brain cancer he was diagnosed with around the time the book was released. It’s estimated that without sleep you would certainly die within around four weeks: Paul’s aim, in the end is to survive those four weeks. Nod is a book for dreamers who have become scared to dream, making it a delightful bit of horror." Starburst

Thus meaning they'll know exactly how much bullshit went into that one line. To briefly deconstruct it: Leia is forced to watch the destruction of her homeworld, powerless to stop it; the death star isn't in any way Vader's, and throughout the first movie she's largely contemptuous of Han. To portray her as vapid and indifferent as Barnes does here is... honestly kind of insulting to one of science fiction's most prominent women. Paul is one of the few sleepers left, only about one in a thousand people can now catch forty winks, the rest of the world is awake. This includes Paul's partner Tanya and as she loses more and more sleep she becomes agitated and confused. If things are looking bad indoors, the outside is even worse as the once peaceful citizens of Vancouver are getting to the end of their tether and they will do anything just to get some sleep; even if that means catching and killing one of the strange sleep-able children that roam the woods. Nod explores the slow disintegration of humanity through sleep deprivation. Reality is distorted as the conceptual fiction of the world of Nod turns fact in the eyes of the Awakened. A harsh insomnia overthrows the daily grind, replacing it with a hazed infused horror fun-house that strips the characters down to their basic need to just survive.Another layer of civilisation peels away, as Paul crushes the skull of an Awakened chasing a child Sleeper. As the end of the world begins he is working on his next book, the eponymous Nod, which focuses on words and phrases that have fallen out of common usage and understanding. Anyway, in forgetting words, my thesis went, we abandon them. But the realities those banished words gave voice to don’t vanish: old, unmanned realities lurk eternally in dark woods, in nursery tales, police reports, and skittish memories. Like Grimm wolves.