The Anatomy of Dreams is the debut novel from Wisconsin author Chloe Benjamin, who (going by her photo) is sickeningly young to be so successful. Deservedly successful though – the book has won the Edna Ferber Fiction Book Award as well as receiving numerous prestigious nominations, and it’s a corker. It takes bits of everything I like most in my favourite types of book (thrillers, romance novels, YA fiction, mysteries) and brings them all together in a novel that resists easy genre labelling. And as much as I love a Stephen King thriller or some Megan Abbott teen lit, those books that refuse to be boxed into one category are invariably the ones that really hook me. Benjamin weaves a thread of foreboding mystery through the narrative, evoking the sense of unease one feels with a psychological thriller (Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects is a nice example); yet in another sense the whole book is a coming-of-age romance centred around Sylvie and her love for elusive ‘bad boy’ Gabe. Some of the boarding school chapters come straight out of a high school romance, while the fallen role model story around Professor Adrian Geller reminded me of the dynamic between the students and their professor, Julian, in Donna Tartt’s brilliant The Secret History. There are some familiar elements of that book in this story, which might be why I warmed to it so much – the crumbling yet majestic country house where Sylvie and Gabe go to study (and cook dinners and drink wine) with Geller, the professor as a father figure, and Sylvie’s disillusionment as we watch his inevitable fall from grace. Benjamin has spoken herself about the influence of The Secret History on her writing, but also Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, which explores science and ethics within a similar boarding school setting.
Geller’s controversial work on ‘lucid dreaming’ is central to the whole book and it’s unarguably an interesting concept – but his thesis of ‘unconscious potentials’ perhaps isn’t as mind blowing as Benjamin wants it to be. For me, this is where the book falls down a little. The whole story rests around the ethical consequences of the dream research, which isn’t really explored in enough detail. The Anne case, for instance, is built up dramatically in the first half of the book but when we find out what actually happened, it’s a fairly anticlimactic story. I would have liked more of an insight into the work and deeper exploration of the ideas Thom broaches in his first talk with Sylvie – the dangers of letting someone consciously experience their darkest impulses. Given that the tragedy of the book rests around this concept, the page space that Benjamin gives it feels far too light.
Another gripe I have with the book is Benjamin’s treatment of Gabe; I feel like the story would work much better if he were a more likeable character. As it is, it’s hard to understand why Sylvie makes the decisions she does, especially early in the book. The Sylvie who narrates the book seems level-headed, serious, ambitious and hard-working (as Thom says later “you seemed so square”). Yet she drops her whole university career, in her final year, after less than a week’s consideration, because her high-school crush rocks up out of blue. And this is years after he abandoned her with no explanation. I don’t buy that she sees the work with Geller as an opportunity of a lifetime and, for my part, I lost a lot of respect for her at this point in the book. If Gabe had been more sympathetic, this section of the book would be more believable and I’d have had more faith in (and trust in) our protagonist. Which would have made the end of the book more interesting.
Like in Never Let Me Go, there’s a lot of slightly sinister ambiguity and for the most part this works really well, heightening a sense of dread and highlighting themes of mistrust and deception. What’s real and what’s only dreamed? How do we know we’re only dreaming? ‘When I see my hand, I will know I’m dreaming’ is the mantra, but it rarely seems to actually work in the cases we’re shown. Still, unlike in Ishiguro’s novel, where the revelation halfway through forces us to completely readjust our perspective on what’s come before, on some level the reader of Dreams knows what’s really happening from the beginning. A t least, I don’t think I’ll be the only one to guess! When the ‘twist’ is revealed at the end of the story, we get the satisfaction of confirmation rather than any sense of shock. Still, given that the whole novel explores subconscious knowledge, I guess this is kind of fitting…
Benjamin tries hard to give Sylvie (and the reader) resolution at the end of the story, but I still finished the last page wanting a little more. Although maybe that’s intentional; ultimately, if I wasn’t still thinking about a book and asking questions after I’ve found it a place on the shelf, I’d be disappointed.
