The Nocturnals - Aleksandra Rychlicka

 

Possibly one of the more unusual fictions I’ve read in recent months. I had a sense of being in a Salvador Dali painting! But I also found it most refreshing to see a challenging of convention.

’In the secret community of sleepless tenants on the mysterious Estate, new arrival Liv soon realises that escape is impossible, not just from the past but from the building itself. The Nocturnals is a noir mystery, daring and visceral, when nothing is what it seems.’
Thus runs the Amazon blurb……

The significance of the insomniac characters fuels the sustained theme surrounding, sleep, night, risk of dreaming. There is a dreamlike quality to the narrative and to the writing. Events and the bare bones of everyday occurrences seem distorted, off  balance as if the reader is viewing it all through a cracked lens. It’s unsettling yet compelling. And it seems the residents of the Estate feel a similar way,

‘This exclusive address feels like a facade. The residents don’t seem to really live here; they all dwell among the empty, hostile walls that refused to be claimed. Even Maro’s situation appears tentative. After all these years, it still looks like he’s crashing here.’

Maro presents as a ‘main’ character possibly because he seems to have been there the longest, although that is my interpretation! The characters seem afraid to sleep, afraid of what might fundamentally change when they wake. They are not especially likeable characters. I felt the reader was encouraged to view them objectively, unsympathetically rather than engage in any way. It’s almost as if the writer were manipulating the readers’ emotions and responses. The Estate, too, is a character. It feels like it drives the situations whilst also standing back and watching as events unfold.

‘It is the Estate’s right granted to its residents; to decline any responsibility for past actions.’

And that is a clue to the book's ultimate intention, maybe, to ponder past and memories and how they relate to the present if not the future. For if you don’t sleep you are forever in the present…..

It’s certainly a book to make you think, not to everyone’s taste I imagine, but the writing is almost mesmeric, hypnotic even, a collections of images and metaphors that brand themselves into your brain, certainly a novel that is out of the ordinary.

My thanks to Librarything for a gifted copy.