Before the reader begins Scarlett Thomas’s fantastically gripping new novel, it’s clear that it is a story – a number of variations, in reality – of disaster, its contents web page a file of proof. Letters, audio transcripts, drawings, images, pages torn from a resort guestbook, and a confession: The Sleepwalkers is the tattered, singed and bloodstained scrapbook of a catastrophe.
Because the narrative opens, Richard and Evelyn are honeymooning on the Greek island of Kathos on the beautiful resort Villa Rosa, run by the mysterious and bohemian younger widow Isabella. Doorways on the Villa Rosa are left unlocked; up to now, so idyllic – besides that on the far aspect of the island is a squalid refugee camp, and the newlyweds’ union is clearly, from the outset, a seething mess of darkish sexual secrets and techniques and lies.
Evelyn is our principal narrator, via a sequence of letters to her husband and mother-in-law, and describes the wedding as “cursed” on web page one. The couple arrive on Kathos with Richard’s greatest buddy, Paul, whom Evelyn clearly fancies greater than her husband, and his “rubbery sex-doll” girlfriend Beth. Add to {that a} social mismatch – Richard is a public faculty Metropolis dealer, Evelyn an actor turned screenwriter who began out as his dad and mom’ housekeeper – and the truth that Evelyn’s writing profession is in freefall. Even with out the forecast of an enormous storm, we’d be primed for catastrophe.
The Villa Rosa, too, quickly seems to be removed from the paradise marketed: its quirkily charming decor conceals sinister clues, the native “assist” – lewd gardener Kostas, dropout Christos, barefoot dogsbody Hamza – are evasive at greatest, and more and more brazenly hostile, and its promise of the straightforward life is a lie. Communications disappear, doorways are locked “on your personal safety”, and conversations are monitored.
Nor are Richard and Evelyn the primary couple to hit the rocks on the Villa Rosa. The sleepwalkers of the novel’s title have been two earlier visitors, the Border-Kearneys – he “troubled” after discovering God; she researching a journey piece – who, based on native reviews, walked into the ocean whereas asleep and drowned the 12 months earlier than the primary narrative begins.
Then Evelyn discovers that Isabella (whose free-spiritedness, she notes, largely consists in her not sporting underwear and flirting breathily with Richard) has written a screenplay based mostly on the drowned couple’s story and {that a} Hollywood producer is on his technique to meet her. The poisonous brew of resentments and horrible secrets and techniques involves the boil simply because the climate breaks, and it isn’t solely the seaside that’s washed away.
Thomas is a author who gives virtually each satisfaction a reader calls for. The plot construction is ingenious and demanding with out being onerous. She has an unerring capability to conjure environment – the stress on the island, even within the first pages, is palpable. The novel can be a wickedly humorous satire of privileged obliviousness: the sleepwalking spouse, on a go to to the island’s refugee camp, says it reminds her “of Glastonbury, with out the crying infants”, and when Evelyn, on the cellphone to a producer, tells her that she’s in a hospice automotive park, the lady’s response is: “Oh gosh, how fascinating.”
Thomas’s basis stone is a peerlessly deft and nuanced talent at creating character, from the manipulative Isabella to the weak, snobbish, pampered Richard, clinging to redemption by a shred of sincere intuition. However it’s Evelyn on whose believability the novel rests, and he or she is a masterly creation: prickly, insecure, self-dramatising; an overthinker, directly sly and liable to blurting out truths; a zigzagger, a back-tracker, in flight from her personal injury, lustful and with a hopelessly thwarted capability for love. As a author, Evelyn can be the last word unreliable narrator, and Thomas should carry off that fiendishly troublesome trick of constructing her evasions and exaggerations seen whereas permitting them the facility to deceive, and ultimately, haltingly, guiding her in direction of revelation. Intelligent, emotionally resonant, filled with startling twists and darkish turns and really humorous certainly, that is fiction roaring on all cylinders.
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