The night the world stopped sleeping

When the Black Death swept across Western Europe in 1348, all human and divine laws broke down.

According to the Italian writer Boccacio, people either locked themselves away and tried to live moderately until the plague had ended, or they threw themselves into a frenzy of excess.

Some took to beating themselves with knotted whips, giving rise to the phenomenon we know as the danse macabre – the dance of death.

We live with the fear of the apocalypse. In Yorkshire writer Adrian Barnes’ frightening short novel Nod, it arrives one Thursday night in the form of mass sleeplessness.

The central nervous system of an entire city – Vancouver – breaks down, as sleep deprivation leads to the rapid break down of civilisation. Indeed, sleeplessness sweeps across the world like one of the plagues of Egypt.

Those who cannot sleep quickly turn on those who can and hunt them down. Irrationality turns rapidly into insanity. Seattle is destroyed by a nuclear attack from an American aircraft carrier, the back-blast of which wipes out everyone on board, except for one slowly dying man.

The breakdown of individuals is mirrored by the total breakdown of civilisation’s support system – water, power, communications, food supplies. Vancouver quickly becomes like the set of a George Romero movie, picked over by bands of marauders led by outcasts and freaks.

The story is written in a school exercise book by Paul, an etymologist, over a period of 24 days. “It’s getting harder and harder to tell the living from the dead,” he writes on Day 18, the opening sentence of his apocalyptic chronicle.

During those three-and-a-half weeks he kills two people.

The tone of his narrative changes accordingly, from witty observational comedy during the first couple of days, when nobody can believe what’s happened, to spaced-out fatalism. Paul is able to sleep. Tanya, his girlfriend, cannot.

After six days of no sleep, a human being starts to come apart. No-one knows why this has happened, only that there is no remedy.

In face of the likely end of homo sapiens as a species, Paul finds himself worshipped as a prophet by The Awakened – a band of the sleepless whose self-appointed leader, the Admiral of the Blue, claims that those who sleep are demons who must be destroyed.

In the old life that is dying he was known to Paul and Tanya as Charles, a red-faced down-and-out.

Charles decides for his own mad purpose that Paul has foreseen the future in the past, based on his reading of a manuscript copy of Paul’s new book about old words and phrases no longer in common usage called Nod.

According to Paul, these words still operate deep in the sub-strata of human consciousness. Nod was also the mythical terrain to the east of Eden where Cain was banished for murdering his brother Abel.

There are precedents for this type of story. In H G Wells’ The Time Machine, the world that the Time Traveller goes back to is divided into the Morlocks and the Eloi.

The former are underground creatures who shun the daylight. They come out at night to capture and feed off the Eloi, the gentle, pastoral people who live in terror of their subterranean neighbours.

John Wyndham’s novel The Day Of The Triffids has most of humanity afflicted by blindness as the result of a solar flare engineered by invading extra-terrestrials.

There is no such plot-driver evident in Nod. One day, as in a fairy tale, sleeplessness just happens. Paul’s struggle to save a child, Zoe, from blood-drinking maniacs, reminds me of Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road, in which a father and his young son negotiate a ruined landscape populated by flesh-eaters.

Adrian Barnes was influenced by the futuristic writing of Harlan Ellison. Anyone curious to know his hopes for the real world can ask him on Wednesday, when he comes to Waterstones in Bradford for a book-signing, from 11am.