Remember the scene from "(500) Days of Summer" with Tom's expectations and reality playing simultaneously? I keep thinking of that scene as I try to put together how I feel about Mike McCormack's Notes from a Coma. If my expectations for the novel were playing on one side, they would be an almost sci-fi look at the use of deep coma for incarceration, with a focus on J.J., who volunteers for the project. However, in reality, Notes from a Coma centers almost entirely on J.J.'s life leading up to his entrance into the project; his extreme giftedness, the tragic loss of his best friend and his eventual nervous breakdown.

The more detailed information on the Somnos project is told in footnotes, which are more difficult to follow in the digital version than I imagine they would be in a print copy. The length of the more technical footnotes within the interview style text made the novel lose fluidity, making J.J.'s story lose some of its impact.

Overall, I was thrown off by the novel I ended up reading as opposed to the book I expected and, honestly, I think I would have preferred the later. While J.J.'s history is definitely key to the story, I feel like Mike McCormack really missed a great opportunity to fully explore the the premise he set the book around.
( )

Mike McCormack’s Notes From a Coma is arresting and brilliant literary counterpoint. That is, there are two story lines working together in this book, one in the main text and the other in the footnotes. These two tales couldn’t be at greater stylistic odds with one another; however, the author intends them to work together to enhance the whole. Whether or not this is successful depends entirely on each individual’s unique taste. Personally, I found this novel appealed to me best in retrospect, rather than through the direct experience of reading it.

In the main story, this novel is a warm and affectionate portrait of a psychologically troubled young genius growing up in a supportive rural Irish community. The tale starts with a two-year old boy being rescued from a Romanian orphanage and raised by a single father on a farm in Louisburgh, in western Ireland. He is given the name JJ O’Malley. He grows up sustained by a caring and close community that accepts him and loves him despite the fact that he is significantly set apart by his gift of extreme genius. As he grows older, his brilliant and restless mind becomes a curse. He is mentally exhausted by what he refers to as a never-ending “mindrot,” an inability to stop his brain from racing. He seeks relief by applying as a volunteer for a controversial test of a potential new European Union penal scheme called the Somnos Project. The Project seeks to prove that keeping prisoners temporarily in a deep coma might be more economical and beneficial to society than typical modern incarceration. Before it is implemented, the idea needs to be tested on a few prisoners and one normal control. Ultimately, JJ is selected as the control. During the test, all five subjects are put in a deep coma on a prison ship moored in Killary Harbour. There, they are studied extensively for three months.

In the sizable footnotes (which comprise perhaps thirty percent of the text), a second storyline is told in sharp contrasting counterpoint. Here, the literary style takes on the feel of an ultra cerebral, avant-garde, sci-fi mood piece, rife with technospeak and pseudo academic babble. These are the Notes From a Coma from which the title was derived. They relate the social, political, and technical details of the Somnes Project and the global, live, reality-show media event that resulted. In historical perspective, this Project is so important that it, along with the Twin Towers’ collapse, define a new age.

Throughout the work, the two stories abruptly collide. Time and again, the author forces us to pull away from the realistic warm human story (often just when the action is getting interesting), to be dumped confused and irritated into the almost surreal and dream-like footnotes, where we struggle with overly complex ideas melded with analytical technobabble—some reading like cerebral hallucinations. What emerges from these odd footnotes is a hazy but sublime portrait of a high-tech, politically corrupt, economy-focused, media-crazed culture moving toward its apogee, a culture drained of humanity, but desperately striving for spirituality…a world frighteningly close to how we are today.

The question is whether or not this counterpoint works.

Personally, I was intrigued, fascinated, and impressed. I enjoyed the intellectual challenge. I took pleasure in imagining the visual images that the novel suggested, particularly those that I had to struggle to create from the complex dream language of the footnotes. Typically, I don’t read past my bedtime, but this book grabbed me, and I read it far into the night in order to finish it. The next day I went back and reread the footnotes and realized that I’d missed a lot of significant information the first time around. I’ve been thinking about this book for a few days now, and I find that there is much that satisfies me as I examine it in retrospect. In the future when I think back on this book, I’m sure I will remember the counterpoint equally with the story. I now see the counterpoint as an important thematic sledgehammer.

Notes From a Coma is a strange challenging gem of a literary novel. It is certainly not for everyone. If you enjoy ultra cerebral sci-fi and avant-garde literature (e.g., Phillip K. Dick, Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard—challenging works with strong sociological, political, and metaphysical themes), this book may interest you. I recommend this book with significant reservations knowing that it will greatly please some and leave others confused and irritated. ( )

This book was intriguing. The main character JJ is one that I simply loved. He was adopted and although he is eccentric in thought and mannerism, he seems to be accepted in his society. He volunteers for a project which shows his eccentric actions even more. The others in this project are criminals which JJ is not. The project is to deep induced coma. I loved the characters and even how JJ said very little in the actual book. The reader’s knowledge came from other people connected to him and memories, this was unique and different. The plot and story line was very good in my mind and thought.
The only problem I had was the footnotes… too many, too long and they interrupted the storyline. It was very hard to read a little, read a footnote and then go back to the story. The story would have read so much smoother if the information had been blended in with the book itself. Without the footnote issue I would have rated this book higher.
I did receive this book via goodreads and certainly do appreciate the chance to read it. ( )

Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma made quite a splash in Ireland when it was published there in 2005, receiving such a good reception from readers and critics that it was shortlisted in 2006 for the Irish Book of the Year award. Now it makes its American debut as a Soho Paperback Original.

The book has a strange feel to it. Because it was written eight years ago, it is set in the recent past – but with just enough spin on that past to give the story a bit of a surrealistic science fiction feel. Largely character-driven, Notes from a Coma tells the story of JJ O’Malley, a young man characterized as “someone who is too smart for his own good but not smart enough to see that.”

Anthony O’Malley, a lonely Irish farmer, plucked JJ from a filthy Romanian orphanage not long after the overthrow of that country’s communist government. It was a relatively simple cash transaction (something that would haunt JJ’s self-esteem when he figured it out), and in a matter of days the naïve Irishman was back on the farm with his months-old son. And, with much help from a neighbor’s wife who had a young son of her own, the brilliant JJ O’Malley thrived in his new world.

JJ O’Malley is one of those students who have their teachers scrambling just to keep up with them, much less stay one step ahead. He fits in well, the community takes pride in him, and he has long-term girlfriend and a best friend he considers to be more his brother. Then one day JJ’s emotional security is devastated by a shocking loss that no one can help him work his way through. But when the young man ends up on a prison ship docked in nearby Killary Harbor, part of an ambitious medical experiment he has volunteered for, the town is still proud of him.

The European Penal Commission is looking for an alternative it can offer to first-time offenders being incarcerated for what it considers to be “less serious” crimes. Perhaps, placing these offenders into a deep coma under strict medical supervision for the duration of their sentences is the answer. JJ and his fellow volunteers are on the prison ship to test the theory.

Notes from a Coma is a story told simultaneously at two levels. Many, if not most, of the book’s pages include supplementary footnotes that explain everything from the evolution of the Sommos project (as the study is called) to details concerning brain activity and European Union politics. While the notes do add greatly to an understanding of what is happening on board the Event Horizon, readers will have to decide how best to approach them. They might want to read the notes page-by-page as they are presented, read each chapter’s narrative before reading that chapter’s footnotes, or even skip (something I do not recommend) the footnotes altogether.

Although I would have preferred an ending with more closure, Notes from a Coma is an intriguing novel that touches on many of the moral and ethical questions of the day. Mike McCormack is one to watch.

Rated at: 4.0 ( )

An alternate reality, almost familiar but hauntingly different. A young genius dealing with a tragic incident. A novel idea for incarcerating prisoners using a deep, medically induced coma. These are the elements that come together in this novel to paint an unsettling portrait of J.J. O'Malley, a troubled young man recovering from a total breakdown who volunteers to be the 'control' patient in a three month deep coma experiment - the counterpoint to the criminals who have volunteered for the pilot project.

There is a lot that it good about this book. Recounted from a multi-narrator viewpoint, J.J. O'Malley gradually appears as a conflicted, unsettled but highly intelligent subject. Peppered with footnotes that create the atmosphere, the essential sense of otherness, of the Ireland that the novel is set in, the interview-style of the book gives a veneer of academic credibility to the story. When done well, this single step to the side of the world we know seems an eerie reflection of something familiar as if the mirror is flawed somehow and we don't quite recognise the image. McCormack certainly has an interesting literary vision and this books attempts to realise that vision in an intelligent and thought-provoking way.

Therein lies the rub. While the book has great ambitions, it doesn't quite realise them for me. In a multi-perspective book, the narrators have to speak with clear individual voices for it to be fully effective. McCormack doesn't quite achieve this here. On more than one occasion, I found I had to flick backwards and remind myself who was speaking in a section. The writing flowed, it wasn't clunky or unnatural, but neither did McCormack move far enough away from his own authorial voice to allow the characters to truly speak for themselves. I understand the effect that the footnotes were intended to have but, for me, they were just too many and too long and this interfered with the flow of the narrative. I think the lack of distinct character voices could have contributed to this interruption because sometimes when returning from the footnote, I was momentarily distracted from the narrator and the voice was too indistinct for me to quickly re-establish a connection. This affected how invested I was in the characters. The book raises what should be interesting social and moral questions, the footnotes integral to this, however, I found that I was too detached from the characters and the events to be really intrigued or drawn on the ideas. It is a fine line when trying to present a novel with an academic 'voice' and, for me, this doesn't quite get it right.

Nonetheless, this is a book worth considering. It is not a bad book, just not quite a great book. ( )