Sleepwalker’s slayings spur stirring debut

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This article was published 20/01/2024 (981 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Here’s the hook for this buzzy British psychological thriller: Anna Ogilvy allegedly murdered her two best friends and business partners while she was sleepwalking. After sending a text that could be read as a confession, she entered into a deep sleep that has lasted for four years. Sleep disorder specialist Ben Prince has been brought in to bring Anna back to consciousness, but the deeper Ben gets into the case, the more he suspects things aren’t what they seem.

With this twisty, tantalizing premise — you can already see how it will translate into a high-end streaming series — London-based Matthew Blake’s debut novel kicked off a publishers’ bidding war.

But will this much-hyped book keep you up at night or put you to sleep?

Maybe a bit of both.

The opening section of the novel is catchy, carefully constructed and packed with smart, salient things to say about our cultural obsession with true crime, the toxicity of our social media discourse, theories of mind and consciousness and the fascinating science of sleep. That strong start is why it’s such a letdown when an increasingly repetitive and overly long narrative strains to wrap things up.

Ben works at an exclusive London sleep clinic but is struggling professionally and personally. He’s a sad divorced dad whose cramped, out-of-the-way flat doesn’t allow for joint custody of his young daughter. He’s hoping a high-profile case will get him on track, and Anna O. is definitely high profile.

She’s a 25-year-old journalist from a wealthy, prominent, dysfunctional family, and she’s accused of a violent double homicide. Add in the fact that the crimes took place at “The Farm,” which offers an upscale role-playing scenario in which “Hunters” are pitted against “Survivors” in a primeval forest, and the Anna O. case is basically tabloid catnip.

Anna’s condition, a kind of involuntary, extended state of minimal consciousness called “Resignation Syndrome,” also means she remains a conveniently blank slate, with the polarized circus of social media free to cast her as either a female monster or a frail, innocent martyr.

As Ben suggests, Anna has become “a figment of the public imagination, an archetype recycled down the centuries, the eternal feminine and the fallen woman, reimagined by every culture.” There’s even a university course “on misogyny, myth and the media in which Anna’s case features prominently,” he informs us.

Ben, likable and level-headed, seems to be trying hard to convince us he’s a reliable narrator. Clearly, though, he has some blind spots, which we begin to suspect as his first-person point-of-view is interspersed with other sources.

These include accounts by Clara, Ben’s former wife, who just happened to be the first police officer on the scene of the murders; observations by Lola, the online pseudonym of an Anna O. true-crime aficionado; clinical notes from a notorious criminal psychiatric facility; musings by an enigmatic “Patient X;” and excerpts from Anna’s notebooks, which have been missing since the night of the murders.

There are allusions to Shakespeare, Greek myth, Hitchcock and Harry Potter. Psychoanalysis fans will recognize in the title a reference to one of Freud’s most famous cases. Anna’s newspaper-headline nickname —“the Sleeping Beauty” – combines with Dr. Prince’s last name to call up fairy tales.

And Anna’s writings, in which she hopes to crack open an infamous English murder case, make repeated mentions of Truman Capote’s true-crime classic In Cold Blood.

Blake’s own prose is not quite operating at Capote levels, but at least for the novel’s opening section, it’s clear and intelligent. That promising build-up doesn’t hold, though, and Blake eventually becomes the victim of his own ambition. To prolong the suspense for over 400 pages, plot points become more contrived, characters more improbably obtuse. The novel becomes a little somnambulistic, and even the long-delayed reveal probably won’t be enough to jolt the reader awake.

Alison Gillmor writes on pop culture for the Free Press.