The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey review – a good night’s sleep? In her dreams
Insomnia is the long night’s journey into day, where the repetitive cycles of sleep are reduced to a single, unending interlude that can go on and on – in the case of novelist Samantha Harvey, for 40 or 50 excruciating hours.
In a 2018 online essay, which appears to have served as a taster for her new memoir, The Shapeless Unease, she likens sleeplessness to the kind of reflective postmortem that follows the end of a relationship. “What did I do to make it leave? What can I do to get it back?”
Not unlike Marina Benjamin’s elegant 2018 study, Insomnia, Harvey’s examination of her year-long insomnia is an excavation of the emotions that might cause sleeplessness. It’s a kind of philosophical detective story strewn with submerged clues. Lying awake at 3am, she circles the shrinking perimeter of her mind for answers, like “a polar bear in its grubby blue-white plastic enclosure with fake icecaps and water that turns out to have no depth”.
How, Harvey wonders, do you go from 40 years of blissful slumbering to the common but misunderstood condition that doesn’t even afford the sufferer the “sad prestige of being unwell”? Clues are there from her book’s first pages when she mourns the sudden death of a cousin who suffered from, and succumbed to, epileptic seizures: death came for him; sleep left her.
There’s no recognised cure for insomnia, but for Harvey swimming comes close
One sleepless night soon after, she’s lured, through her computer’s search engine, into addressing the stages of her cousin’s decomposing corpse, clumsily put back together after the postmortem with his windpipe missing, bacteria feeding on his gut and skin. Heightened thoughts of her own mortality and myriad other candidates for insomnia, including the menopause, are considered as Harvey edges towards a psychological root, which she can’t name confidently.
But what’s the point of being awake, she asks, on permanent amber alert, for no good physical reason? Though a friend tells her that “there is no grace for the imagination. You cannot be saved from an assailant that doesn’t exist”, Harvey argues that sleep deprivation is a real threat to good health. Fear of not sleeping renews and increases the fear such that it becomes “a vicious circle of Euclidean perfection”.
Just as much as insomnia, though, The Shapeless Unease is a meditation on the nature of creativity (writing in particular); how it emerges even in the course of a fractured life. Harvey takes comfort from and marvels at lines in poetry such as Philip Larkin’s “the million-petalled flower of being here” in The Old Fools for their uncanny, revelatory ability to “knock a solitary life a fraction off its axis”. The same is true of the best of Harvey’s prose. Her countless aphorisms (“fiction is the laundering of experience into the offshore haven of words”) are a delight to read. And she has great comedic timing. During a respite from sleeplessness, she is seduced by “the knowledge that I must be dreaming and therefore partly asleep, and with the realisation of this I have the swiftest moment of triumph – I’m asleep! – before waking up”.
Related: The Western Wind by Samantha Harvey review – a priest turns cop
Harvey’s inability to sleep plunges her into a vertiginous world. Left alone with recursive thoughts within thoughts, she wonders about the following: why so many TV programmes have the word “secret” in the title; why Larkin’s aforementioned poem has a Zen-like reassurance about death (“it’s only oblivion”); why she’s started writing a story about a David Bowie-loving man who robs a cash machine and loses a wedding ring (the short story works its way into the memoir); why caravans are called things such as Pegasus, Sprite, Unicorn; whether the Pirahã (indigenous people of the Amazon rainforest), who live in the present with no capacity for abstract thought, ever have trouble sleeping; and whether she might have inherited fatal familial insomnia (which is as bad as it sounds).
The fragmentary style of the memoir chimes with the temporal nature of Harvey’s condition; it is an account of her slippery present life that’s suffused with the sense of a timeless fable. The writing slips in and out of the first and third person; sometimes composed from the perspective of sleeplessness as a malevolent protagonist bent on reducing her to a state of learned helplessness.
There’s no recognised cure for insomnia, but for Harvey swimming comes close. Her reflections on dipping into a lake (“she’s like a seed-head that’s been scattered – pale, insubstantial, resilient and journeying”) have the quality of a lucid dream. At last sleeplessness is interrupted, removing her need for the “blunt, anaesthetised, dreamless, coffin-like oblivion of sleeping pills”.
The clinical psychologist Rubin Naiman once bemoaned that “sleep has been transformed from a deeply personal experience to a physiological process; from the mythical to the medical”. With The Shapeless Unease, Samantha Harvey has reversed that process in ways that are ineffably rewarding.
• The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping by Samantha Harvey is published by Jonathan Cape (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p over £15
