The Coma, by Alex Garland

Alex Garland’s The Coma (Faber/Penguin, unabridged, 2 CDs, 2 hr, £12.99, offer £10.39) is perfect audiobook material. Carl has been beaten into a coma by Tube-train thugs, and we are inside his head, hearing the world as he is experiencing it, a prolonged dream that takes him back into his past and reinterprets his presence. Reality and illusion elide: is he picking up the broken threads of his life, or on a life-support machine? Garland has a clinically accurate eye for telling details, and builds up the young man’s world so that we know not what he does, or even his official identity, but much deeper things about him: how he thinks, what sort of person he is. Matthew MacFadyen’s reading is beautifully paced, by turns full of menace, panic-stricken, nostalgic, tender and wise.

The Coma by Alex Garland
Read by Matthew Macfadyen Running time 2 hours, unabridged
Penguin £12.99 on 2 CDs

Late one night, on his way home from work, a young man called Carl is attacked while trying to defend a woman on a tube train. When he comes back to some form of consciousness, he is lying in a hospital bed, recovering from his injuries.

But Carl's experiences of the life he returns to are fragmented and confusing. Gradually, he comes to realise the new world he has entered is the land of his coma.

As he narrates his thoughts and dreams, Carl takes a matter-of-fact approach to his situation, throwing up questions about the very nature of what it means to be alive. If you lose your arms, you're still the same person. But take away consciousness, despite the full complement of arms and legs, and the person is gone.

Matthew Macfadyen is not the best of readers; he sometimes loses the listener with the monotony of his voice but he does convey a sense of who Carl is, while blurring the lines of imagination and reality, giving the story a hallucinatory feel.