Book Review: The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas

I am a sucker for a good postmodernist novel, and Scarlett Thomas’ The Sleepwalkers is just that best sort of brain candy for readers like myself. I should have known from the Contents page alone that this was going to be a book that dropkicked to the curb the well-worn tropes of privileged tourists uncovering murder and mayhem in an exotic foreign locale. And while there are plenty of the trappings of an escapist beach read to enjoy here, there’s also so much more. 

For starters, almost no one is innocent in these pages, as everyone, even the victims, are curiously complicit in making themselves the main characters of stories unnecessarily rich with pain. But this isn’t a book about victim blaming. This is a book about the complicated choices that come with agency. As the main character of the novel, an actress and playwright named Evelyn whose star has been on the wane, writes in a letter:

[Y]ou’re not the only one who has accused me of making things up. It’s always been the same kind of dirt that sticks to me: slightly crazy actress who doesn’t know what is real and what is fake; who imagines drama where there is no drama; who drives her husband away with her petty jealousy. The girl who kneels in puddles to give blow jobs to men she doesn’t even like, because she simply must be in a story, even if she has to be the femme fatale, or, worse, the victim.

 

But even that girl rarely goes so fucking mad as to believe in an entirely different version of the world.

Evelyn, you see, has been on the honeymoon from hell. She’s trapped on a beautiful but remote Greek island as storms are rolling in, forced to stay in a strange hotel where the owner is awful to her while fawning over her newlywed husband Richard. To add insult to injury, Richard claims that Evelyn is overreacting and being, as a matter of fact, quite mean to beautiful young Isabella, who is surely only doing her best as their hostess.

As everyone seemingly conspires to tell Evelyn that she’s just imagining the worst of everything, a pair of producers descends on the Villa Rosa, wanting to hear the story of the Sleepwalkers, another married couple who’d stayed there a year ago and tragically drowned after walking out into the sea together. Isabella is eager to tell them all about it but Evelyn, who knows a thing or two about performance and narrative, immediately suspects that not all is quite as it seems here. The more she uncovers about the Villa Rosa and the people in its orbit, however, the greater the danger she finds herself in.

Told in the form of found documents collected to create an overarching narrative, this is a book that not only coolly eviscerates the fairy tales rich tourists tell themselves about their much less wealthy surroundings, but also grapples with the idea of who really owns a story and who should be allowed to tell it. In Ms Thomas’ capable hands, reality itself seems to distort around the idea of truth in beauty, as surprising champions and adversaries of the idea emerge over the course of the novel. Even Richard, despite being a master gaslighter when it suits him, proves himself firmly in his wife’s corner on at least one topic. Her last one-woman show had been brutally received, perhaps for its very honesty in not advancing an expected storyline:

And, OK, I know I’m not the greatest feminist in the world, but I was so angry on your behalf then. All those centuries of male artists being given the benefit of the doubt. <i>Lolita</i>, for heavens’ sake! My English master at school was still recommending it as a literary classic in 2009. […] All of the complex, layered, disgusting – and frankly <i>great</i> – works of literature by men that have stood so proudly on bookshelves for centuries. When women were finally allowed into this world they were basically given about five minutes before they were told to shut up and behave and never write anything with nuance.

Nuance is the key to this startling portrait of marriages and murders and pasts spliced together by secrets and shame. Ms Thomas’ writing is like a riptide: it was a struggle for me as a reader to do anything beyond lose myself in her narrative flow. I felt at times breathless, if not outright suffocated, by the near unbearable tension of what she puts her characters through. The few people who do try to make things better on the island soon find themselves similarly powerless in the face of forces entirely outside of their control. Survival in the moment becomes the guiding force for all of them, as it has been for humanity ever since we first crawled out of the ooze. 

Yet the odd glimmers of hope at the end for an unnamed but divergent reality, so different from what we’ve experienced and believe, so alien to the story Evelyn has told herself and us in order to survive – oh, it is an interrogation into story as truth that is as clever and disorienting as the rest of this novel. Honestly, the last thing that I expected when I picked up this thriller was to find it as intellectually engaging as it is entertaining and compulsively readable. Pick it up for your escapist White Lotus thrills, but I dare you to come away from it feeling at all unchallenged about what great fiction can do.