A small Californian town is under threat when a mysterious virus starts spreading from the local college; people fall asleep and can’t be woken. Karen Thompson Walker handles the material very efficiently, building up an atmosphere of disbelief that escalates gradually until the town is cut off from the outside world by a ‘cordon sanitaire’. No one is allowed in; no one can leave. The disease affects everyone, from the smallest new-born baby to the elderly and confused living in a nursing home. There are echoes of Camus’ The Plague and of Rip Van Winkle, laced with theories about sleep and dreaming from ancient Greece via Freud to the latest findings of neuroscientists. All against a quietly smouldering background of global warming: the lake is drying up, trees are slowly dying and the whole area is at the risk of devastating forest fires.
The sense that this illness affects all is echoed by the way the story is told from several viewpoints with no one central character: a young fresher who doesn’t fit in; two young sisters with an eccentric father; a professor grieving for his partner and a young couple patching together their marriage with a new baby amongst others.
The Dreamers is a subtle story where reality and dreaming become mixed, and the decisions we take in how to live our lives are put under the microscope. A quietly devastating page-turner.
Published Feb 2019
Ali Thurm 