Book of the week
The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape, $35)
Soon after her epileptic cousin was found dead in his flat, Samantha Harvey stopped sleeping. This was around the same time that she voted Remain in the EU referendum, her sister split up from her partner, her elderly father fell off a ladder and broke his leg, and she moved to a house where the bedroom looked on to a road. A 43-year-old novelist, Harvey had slept well until June 2016, after which bedtime brought with it
levels of panic that amounted to madness. Her head, as it hit the pillow, would sting as though her scalp were ‘‘being stitched with embroidery needles’’, her heart, ‘‘a tough lump of meat, flooded with fear’’, medieval demons sat on her chest, she ‘‘argued’’ with the traffic outside her window and fantasised that an earthquake might cause the road to close.
Night after night the blackness opened up and sucked her in. Between midnight and dawn she inhabited a parallel universe; her sleep deprivation was, Harvey says, like having a tiger in the room. She felt in the mornings as though her body had been
‘‘assaulted’’ – and sometimes it had. When she had been awake for 40 or 50 hours at a stretch, Harvey would find herself banging her head against the wall or hitting it with her own fists.
She tried herbal remedies, acupuncture, and prescription drugs; she went to a CBT sleep clinic and a Buddhist retreat, she did a stress-reduction mindfulness course, she changed her diet, swam for hours every day, did restful jigsaws and mosaics, listened to birdsong identification CDs, an audio edition of Remembrance of Things Past, and episodes of In Our Time. But still she lay there, heart pounding, imagining the decomposition of her cousin’s body in the earth, which led to thoughts of her mother’s eyes being eaten one day by predatory beetles and to memories of the alsatian she had loved as a child, who had died of neglect when he became collateral in her parent’s divorce.
Sleeplessness made her feral; Harvey prowled the house and howled at the Moon. But she also turned inwards and thought obsessively about her own consciousness, because sleep deprivation turns us all into navelgazing, wild-eyed loons.
The Shapeless Universe isa merciless and self-mocking memoir in which Harvey shows us
the insomniac’s universe of ‘‘edgeless expanse’’.
She composes a letter to her dead cousin to explain what she has discovered on Google about the stages of his ‘‘descent into black putrefaction’’; she gives us the draft of a story she is writing about a man who loses his wedding ring while he is robbing a cashpoint; she imagines herself as a medical case study in which her condition is diagnosed as PBI (Post-Brexit Insomnia) with possible Fatal Familial Insomnia (a very rare hereditary disease resulting in premature death) and a touch of OD (Over-reactive Disorder), and refers us in a footnote to an article on PMPS (Pointless Mortality Projection Syndrome).
We follow the thread of her night fears, seeing how, in their ‘‘shapeless unease’’ – because life without sleep creates a merging of days – they form one continuous fog.
When you lose the capacity to sleep you also lose what Harvey calls ‘‘the silken path towards sleep’’. The ‘‘mercy and grace’’ we experience ‘‘before we close our eyes, and go under’’ are what ‘‘all the religions in the world were invented to express’’.
Writing should take us to places we wouldn’t otherwise go. Harvey invites us to open our eyes in the dark and feel the tiger in the room.