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Favorable
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Booklist Frank Sennett
Slight but entertaining, this Mobius strip of a novel should fuel the cult following that Garland cultivated among twentysomethings with The Beach.
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Favorable
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Salon Scott Lamb
A man wakes after a brutal subway assault to a world that isn't quite right, in this brief but unputdownable summer read from the author of "The Beach."
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Favorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Alan Cheuse
Garland's latest, a dreamy haze of a narrative called "The Coma," with stark woodblock illustrations by his father, Nicholas Garland, will only add to his reputation for intriguing, ingenious and intellectually stimulating fiction.
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Favorable
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Village Voice Dennis Lim
Haunted by its own incorporeality, The Coma wafts through the gray borderlands of consciousness, exerting a limpid, yogic mindfulness on the internal logic of dream life and the elusive act of waking.
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Mixed
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Sydney Morning Herald Jose Borghino
I couldn't help thinking that the book felt like a five-finger exercise for a writer with a lot more talent.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Christopher Tayler
The trapped-in-a-solipsistic-dream-world business doesn't have to be a bad thing in itself, and the first half of The Coma is fairly entertaining. But working out how to get out of the dream-world turns out to be a lot less interesting than working out that you're in it in the first place.
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Mixed
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Daily Telegraph Theo Talt
The kind of dislocated narrative trickery that works well in film often looks a bit exposed on the page... especially if the writing, as here, is washed-out and anaemic.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times Bernadette Murphy
Unlike the novels of a century ago with their dignified bulk, "The Coma" can be read in the time it takes to see a film. This crossbreed offers the limitations and richness of both forms simultaneously ... Though the express version may take us to the same location, we miss the ride. [22 June 2004, E9]
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Mixed
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The Guardian Alfred Hickling
The novel's objective seems to be to err on the side of subtlety. Garland's prose probes disinterestedly at a variety of banal situations, until the reader is forced to succumb and accept that the banal can be potentially extraordinary.
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Mixed
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The Independent James Urquhart
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.
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Mixed
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The Onion A.V. Club Scott Tobias
For a while, it's liberating to toe through Garland's dreamscape without setting foot on solid ground, but after he swipes out the rug once too often, the whole thing feels like a silly prank. It's unreasonable to ask Garland to solve the mind-body problem, but loping around in alternate realms of being isn't the same thing as exploring them
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Unfavorable
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The Spectator Olivia Glazebrook
I am convinced that Alex Garland is capable of another brilliant book, but sadly this isn't it. In his efforts to be serious the author has neglected the reader.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Michiko Kakutani
Thanks to Mr. Garland's lucid prose, the book is perfectly readable, but it is ultimately static and unsatisfying as a story and disappointingly slight as a metaphysical meditation about the mysteries of identity and the interface of reality and dreams.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Anthony Quinn
Strange to think that not so long ago Garland was being compared, on the strength of ''The Beach,'' to Graham Greene. This odd and somewhat constipated book is unlikely to be mentioned in such august company, or anything like. It speaks of nothing so much as a writer struggling to be heard but not actually sure whether he has anything to say. ''The Coma,'' while it twitches with life occasionally, never seems to be fully awake.
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Unfavorable
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The Independent Christopher Fowler
Such short fiction needs to provide powerful resonance beyond a revelatory, haunting conclusion, but the waking-dream theme of The Coma has been handled with far greater delicacy by many previous authors, and the painful slimness of this version robs it of any power.
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Unfavorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Much like a dream itself: a novel that eludes definition, makes little sense, and is quickly erased from memory.
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Unfavorable
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Elizabeth Johnston
Ever since Descartes, reason has been separated from feeling and the senses and been given pride of place in Western society. In The Coma we just might have the logical extension of that line of thought: It gets one nowhere.
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Terrible
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Publishers Weekly
By the end of the story, with the narrator unable to tell the difference between reality and fantasy, he finally decides, "None of it was real. I didn't care." Chances are good the reader will feel the same way.
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