The Coma Alex Garland Faber & Faber, £9.99 ISBN 0571223109

Alex Garland's new novella is an exploration of the state of dreaming. A man wakes up in a coma - except that, this being a coma, he has not actually woken up. It takes him a while to realise this, during which time his panic rises. Gradually, the truth of his situation dawns, and from then on he tries in vain to shape his dream into some format shocking or real enough to wake himself up.

It is a bold premise. This author's natural gift, which is considerable, is for narrative. The Beach (1996) announced him as a storyteller of rare ability, and although in The Tesseract (1998) Garland displayed philosophical leanings, I still felt his love of a good yarn won out in the end. I'm sure it is no accident that he has turned his attention to a state which is by definition random and inexplicable, which defies authority and certainty, and leaves him with the bare bones of his style. Although the result is intensely readable, only intermittently is it credibly dreamlike.

The eerie melodrama of the subconscious is brilliantly explored. Minuscule wounds spurt life-threatening quarts of blood. A friend's negligence becomes an incomprehensible cruelty. A cup of coffee without milk is an assault against the self. There are plenty of well-drawn, minor alienations of the kind that occur in dreams - people ask our coma victim how he wants his eggs when they have already cracked them into a pan; they refuse to understand his questions. The amnesia resulting from his head injury engenders some wry exchanges with his dream companions - their conversations stall because they are his own creations.

Much of the dialogue, however, jars with the atmosphere. He walks with his dream girlfriend and they have a conversation about the fish as they pass a river bank. "'I think they do eat them,' Catherine said, maybe having followed the same thought process as me. 'I bet they taste of mud.' 'The fishermen or the fish?' 'Both.'" It does not entirely work, as dialogues in dreams never have the mutual understanding, the logical volley from one mind to another, that they do in real life. Similarly, a taxi driver, talking about a car crash he once had, offers some enlightening advice:

"When I got back in the cab for the first time, I didn't even turn on the engine . . . I didn't even touch the wheel! . . . but I did take off the hand brake. We live on a slight slope, so the cab moved forward a couple of feet or so. No more, because there was a car parked in front. 'You're mad!' my wife said. But look at me now. I'm driving again." He was quiet for a few moments, then added, "It's okay to take things slowly."

Again, this jars with experience. Taxi drivers never impart useful lessons in a dream state - not because they are cabbies: just because it is in the nature of these things that dreams do not offer life truths or aphorisms. However, the author is self-aware enough to understand the paradox of trying to render in narrative an activity that by definition thwarts it.

Every dream that anyone ever had is theirs alone and they never managed to share it. And they never managed to remember it either. Not truly or accurately . . . Our memories and our vocabularies aren't up to the job. You wake, you die.

Yet to know inauthenticity is not the same as being authentic. This feels like a deliberate exercise in impossibility: it is fascinating but not ultimately satisfying.

Incidentally, there are illustrations by the author's father, the political cartoonist Nicholas Garland. I do like his style, but I don't hold with pictures in novellas; they upset my hoary notions of adult literature.

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