The Sleepwalkers

By Scarlett Thomas
Thriller/Scribner/Paperback/320 pages/$29.59/Amazon SG (amzn.to/4arIBIq)
3 stars

British author Scarlett Thomas turns a beautiful Greek island into a grim setting where marriages end and dark secrets are revealed.

Filled with unlikeable characters, The Sleepwalkers follows newly-wed couple Evelyn and Richard on their honeymoon after a chaotic wedding leaves them stressed and on edge.

But the promised relaxation turns into tension when hotel owner Isabella ignores Evelyn while flirting with Richard, who obstinately refuses to acknowledge the imbalanced treatment.

Thomas tells the tale through unreliable narrators, leaving the reader in a perpetual state of bemusement as to what is truly happening. Adding to the confusion is the fact that the novel is told through a series of incomplete letters, transcripts and notes as if the papers were damaged or lost.

The most frustrating in the cast of nasty characters is Richard, whose attitude towards Evelyn feels less like that of a loving husband and more like an abusive partner. Constant belittling, dismissals of her thoughts and feelings and repeatedly cheating on her are reasons enough to wonder why he remained with a woman he thought so little of.

“You’re extremely hard to talk to, by the way. Has anyone ever told you that? You never listen to the ends of things. You don’t realise what hard work you are, how high maintenance,” he writes in a partially recovered letter to Evelyn.

Though she is certainly the victim of his dismissive words and borderline abusive behaviour, Evelyn is not without faults.

Obsessed with recreating what appears to be a fluke success with her debut one-woman show, the actress also carries on an emotional affair with Richard’s father and actively flirts with Richard’s misogynistic best friend Paul.

In her damaged letter to Richard, Evelyn says: “We never acted on our desire. Out of love for you, we never, ever consummate our flirtation. It would have been disappointing anyway, after all that buildup. Those things always are. Like the first time I slept with your father.”

Twists and turns unfold over the course of letters being read, occasionally broken up with note scraps, one of which requires Google Translate to help unlock a clue.

The tangled plot construction reflects Thomas’ beginnings as a mystery author in 1998 before she branched out into short stories, children’s fiction and non-fiction. Her contemporary cult novel The End Of Mr. Y (2006) was longlisted for the 2008 Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction (now the Women’s Prize for Fiction).

The story does build up to tense moments and adequately primes the reader for the breakdown of Evelyn and Richard’s marriage. But there are also absurd moments that make parts of the novel feel like a low-budget thriller movie. Towards the end, the reader has to suspend his or her disbelief a fair amount to accept Evelyn’s version of events.

The ambiguous ending is clever, leaving the reader wondering how true her story is, answering just enough questions to fill in the bigger picture while allowing him or her to continue pondering and theorising over the details. But whether this is a satisfying ending depends on the reader’s tolerance for unresolved stories.

If you like this, read: The Mysterious Case Of The Alperton Angels by Janice Hallett (Viper, 2023, $22.43, Amazon SG, go to amzn.to/3Q28zdt). Told in transcripts, newspaper articles and pages from books and screenplays, the novel follows a journalist attempting to revive her career by finding a missing mother and baby at the heart of a doomsday cult.