FIRST-time novelist Tom Grieves has concocted a powerful and fascinating tale of mental mind games and Big Brother domination in the thriller Sleepwalkers.
It begins with an ordinary working class English family, which turns out to be anything but ordinary. Ben the mechanic keeps having nightmares in which he’s committing violent acts including murder. Even more disturbing, his night-time persona seems to enjoy inflicting the brutality.
Details
- TITLE: Sleepwalkers
- AUTHOR: Tom Grieves
- PUBLISHER: Quercus
His day-time memory is becoming foggy too, with snippets of sounds or visions he can’t quite place or remember. When Ben tries to fathom out where the dreams are coming from he begins to realise his past is incomplete, and his present may be a façade. Soon he begins to wonder if his wife Carrie is part of it, or if he is imagining the events he thinks have happened.
Meanwhile young Toby, a bullied misfit at school, is having similar nightmares. But he’s on the receiving end of the violence and wakes up with fresh wounds every morning. They could be from his domineering father, or the school bullies, or something far less explicable.
As an aside, it’s terrible to read about the casual way children bully and torment each other and their teachers too, making me pleased to be way beyond school age. If schools are any reflection of what society has become, it’s no surprise there are people trying to change the statues quo with a little bit of mind manipulation.
Toby’s teacher Anna tries to protect the boy and is drawn into a deepening, darkening mystery that she is ill equipped to understand or fight.
Helping them solve the riddle and defeat the unknown, unseen enemy is Terry, a computer geek drop-out with an innate distrust of people in power. Terry’s belief that we are all being programmed to conform by the authorities seems to be backed up when Ben and Toby get phone calls that trigger their different behaviour and propel them into the other side of their lives.
Sleepwalkers starts with Grieves following a laddish, man-in-the-street style of writing, but it soon settles down to become more elegant as the complex and intriguing plot develops. He is very good at building up the suspense and tension, messing with your mind while the unknown enemy messes with the minds of his characters.
As we discover that Ben and Toby are being controlled by external forces the plot reminded me a little of the movie The Truman Show, where Jim Carrey plays a man who is unaware that he is living in a reality TV show being broadcast to millions of viewers around the clock.
But Sleepwalkers is not derivative of the film at all, and perhaps I simply made the connection because the plot is so unusual that my own mind was seeking something familiar to compare it with.
Sleepwalkers is a fascinating concept, and highlights the shallow, vacuous lives so many people lead. As Ben realises he is under constant observation he makes the reader realise this too, with street cameras everywhere and internet searches that can tell you much more about anyone than you could ever legitimately need to know.
There are a few twists in the tale and the ending, particularly, is not as expected. For all that the author has made the behaviour of the mysterious controlling forces seem entirely evil, Grieves gives them some mitigating motives and emotions. This leaves you wondering if, perhaps, controlling the mentality of the masses — or at least the more damaged members of society — might not have some merit after all.
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