A young man falls into a coma after being savagely attacked by thugs on a London Underground train late one night.

He lies unconscious in hospital for days, then seems to recover. But things become odd as he tries to rejoin the outside world and experiences strange leaps in time and weirdly distorted experiences.

The reader, too, becomes increasingly uncertain about where the boundaries between reality and imagination lie.

Writer Alex Garland, who penned cult classic The Beach, is trying to flex his novelist muscles here, and produce more adult, lyrical work than before.

But he ends up making little impact with this slight, inconclusive tale that no doubt aims to provide deep insights into some obscure psychological territory. He only succeeds in being instantly forgettable.

But it's not all bad. The illustrations - woodcuts by Garland's father, the political cartoonist Nicholas Garland - are beautiful.

Updated: 09:00 Wednesday, September 01, 2004