Bringing out the Dead

Now a major motion picture if you hadn't heard. I perfer the book of course, but the movie was entertaining and quoted from the book directly for the most part. Joe Connelly isn't a flowerly writer. His meaning is compressed like Hemmingway somwhat.

"We rushed the dead boy into the emergency room."

The sentence ends a chapter and tells us the outcome without walking us through the scenes, compressing pages into the single adjective "dead." if he was just a boy, the outcome would be uncertain and require more naration. But they rushed the dead boy, that tells us more about them than the boy or the future.

The Coma

"The Pavement, marked with grease and rain and chewing gum. thousands of peices of discarded chewing gum, pressed flat by pedestrians into a constellation. And if I reaches down to touch the paement, I could feel grit beneath my fingers. the grit stuck to the natural oils on my hand. If I lifted my hand and looked at the grit, I could see that like grubby snowflakes each grain was different from the others. Detail. Spectacular. Fractal. "

Alex Garland writes about a dream world experienced by a patient in a coma. the dream-like descriptions are all in first person and even his use of verb tense adds to the surreal feeling of the book. As a whole, the book fails probably for lack of density. It's more of a novella. Nonetheless, certain passages are gripping and totally original.