The Sleepwalkers by Scarlett Thomas – A Violent Cup of Cocoa

The Sleepwalkers is a 2024 novel by Scarlett Thomas.

Evelyn and Richard, a newly married couple, spend their honeymoon at the luxury Villa Rosa Hotel on a Greek island. She’s a writer, he’s a City trader. Evelyn thinks the hotel’s young woman owner is trying to seduce her new husband. It all starts to unravel. And there seems to be a history of things unravelling at this odd establishment. The previous summer, a couple of guests seemingly sleepwalked into the ocean and drowned.

We learn about all this through a set of documents – letters between the main characters, a confession of past misdeeds from Richard, a transcript of a conversation recorded on Evelyn’s phone, an extract from the hotel guest book.

Beyond that it’s hard to say what’s going on.

I suppose as well as being a story, this is also a look at how we make stories.

I remember an episode of The Comic Strip Presents back in the 1980s where a Hollywood studio accepts a script about the miners’ strike, written by a real miner.

“This doesn’t say mining town to me,” says a sulky director arriving in an actual mining town. From there, as far as reality is concerned, it’s down hill all the way. There are similar ideas, and laughs and pulling the ground from under your feet jump-scares, in The Sleepwalkers. An American film producer and his wife are also staying at the Villa Rosa. They have heard the story of the tragic, drowned, sleepwalking guests and plan to turn those events into a film. But the director doesn’t like various details narrated to him, which will need changing in the script.

“What really happened is no good.” A film has other requirements.

Maybe the most ‘real’ part of The Sleepwalkers is an automated transcript of sound recordings on Evelyn’s phone. Have you ever seen automated captions below a video or a television programme mangling the dialogue by being too literal? Well that’s what the transcript section is like. Literal reality comes out as barely comprehensible gibberish. Once again we could say “what really happened is no good.” What really happened needs shaping, sorting out before it starts to make sense. If you are writing a book, you can’t expect to just note every single event during a day, write them all down and have a story. Picking and choosing is necessary, shaping, moulding. Only then will you have a story that people might want to read. Making the point more generally, you could say that “what really happened” has so many aspects to it that there is always the need for some manipulation before we can understand it – which can lead to both confusing distortion, and a considerable smoothing of sharp edges.

In many ways this novel definitely has sharp edges, unflinching in its portrayal of moral murkiness and human failings. Richard’s confession is uncomfortable reading. In other ways the book has anaesthetic qualities that soften the picture. Sleepwalkers, being asleep, don’t know what they’re doing, existing in a state of slumbering misapprehension, vulnerable to unappreciated dangers. They are also protected from any pain they might have experienced in a clearer, more awake scenario. That’s what reading, or ‘sleepwalking’ through this novel is like – disorienting, bewildering, and sometimes as unpleasant as going to the dentist for root canal work. At other times, however, it offers the relief of a deep inhale of pain-relieving laughing gas. Both extremes are aspects of a sophisticated, cleverly constructed read.