The Coma, by Alex Garland

"There's a problem in general with the way in which violence gets depicted," Alex Garland told me six years ago when we were discussing his second novel, The Tesseract. "I think it's very hard to do it in an unglamorous way." He has pretty much achieved that in the brief, detached prologue to The Coma. Travelling home on the last train, Carl finds himself feebly trying to defend a woman molested by a gang of youths. They turn on him, and kick him into insensibility.

"There's a problem in general with the way in which violence gets depicted," Alex Garland told me six years ago when we were discussing his second novel, The Tesseract. "I think it's very hard to do it in an unglamorous way." He has pretty much achieved that in the brief, detached prologue to The Coma. Travelling home on the last train, Carl finds himself feebly trying to defend a woman molested by a gang of youths. They turn on him, and kick him into insensibility.

Physically undescribed, the men are bulky silhouettes in the accompanying monochrome illustration. Nicholas Garland, stalwart cartoonist for The Daily Telegraph, punctures his son's text with 40 blunt woodcuts, framing the narrative with a sombre mood. Squatting on the page following the attack, sporting a nightmarish jack-a-lantern rictus and bloodied hat, is a deformed figurine which reminds me of Alex from Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. With deft strokes, the Garlands quickly establish menace.

Distressed by his friends' insensitivity to his battered condition, Carl gradually realises that he has not been discharged from hospital but is hallucinating encounters while in a coma. He senses that waking up would deliver him from his dream reality to the world he used to inhabit, and so tries to access memories that would stimulate him.

Here Garland's narrative takes on the auto-suggestive quality of computer quest games. Carl navigates his way into a record store to listen to an embedded adolescent influence (Little Richard) which doesn't play quite as he remembers it; then over to a bookstore, with equal lack of success. An obliging cabbie tracks down his childhood home, which Carl admits "was a metaphor I could walk around and clear metaphorical cobwebs from".

To what purpose do we wade through Carl's sensory exploration? He is frightened that, waking or dreaming, "uncertainty was the only prize on offer", and manages to confirm that our memories and vocabularies are not up to describing dreams accurately.

Beyond this is opacity, which is perhaps Garland's alarming but unsatisfying thesis. His taut atmosphere of malevolence slips into one of puzzle and drift. By contrast, Liz Jensen's new novel, The Ninth Life of Louis Drax, sympathetically imagines the hesitant psychology of a coma patient unsure of his realm, swimming beneath a gripping plot in the external world.

The Tessaract proved a bold literary triptych after Garland's blockbuster success with The Beach, but The Coma moves, courageously, further away from dynamic narrative. The basic plot must engage, he told me of The Tesseract, and he achieved that there.

Here, Garland abandons his strengths of subtle plotting and a cinematic ability to capture movement and scene. With information pared to a slender core, not much character and any action bound by hallucination, The Coma offers little more than a tone poem suggesting numinous ramifications. There are depths to be plumbed, but these waters may prove fathomless.