August 30 2025, 11:25

The Sleepwalkers

Author: Scarlett Thomas

First published: 2024

~ 80,000 words. Letters, transcriptions, lists (epistolary!). Evelyn and Richard.

A newly married couple, Evelyn and Richard, are gifted a honeymoon by the groom’s mother at Villa Rosa, an exclusive hotel on a Greek island. We know this because Evelyn tells us in a letter she has written to Richard, which takes up the first third of the novel. The flamboyance and anger in her voice is both attractive and off-putting, and not knowing the structure, I almost put the book down. Fortunately, it’s cleverer than that, and we get a similarly long letter from Richard, as well as short notes from other characters, lists of photographs, and so on. We come to realise the novel is a collection of documents that is also referenced in the story.

It’s a dark comedy, but the themes were darker than I expected, including incest, rape and human trafficking, wrapped in a mystery told in queasily light voices. The thriller-ish final act tying a variety of loose ends (but not all) was quite jarring and uninvolving. It could be I am especially sensitive to this sort of ending because it’s something I tend to do and don’t like in my own stories. It highlights how hard it is to strike a tonal balance that works.

There’s lots to admire. The voices of Evelyn, Richard and the handful of supporting characters are distinct and believable. I’m curious if Thomas knew the whole story before she started writing it, because the way she drops details in about the complex plot is expert. Her descriptions of the island, the hotel and its inhabitants are great.

There’s a fun smuttiness in Evelyn's manner, but there’s nothing funny about the themes. These are the characters voices, and they are privileged, a bit disgusting, very unlucky, abused themselves, and so on, so who am I to say that isn’t how it might be for them? I don’t have to like them. They are who they are. But the story is highlighting the plight of trafficked people, and I wonder if my queasiness is because the upper middle class mystery, as dark as it is, perhaps isn't strong enough to carry the weight of the themes.

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