Book review: The Shapes of Sleep

By J. B. "An Inspector Calls" Priestley. Not a well-known book; judge that by its Wiki page. Old JB is an intelligent and well-brought up chap, and so has written a corresponding book. Without being too unkind to it I suppose I shall say that it would raise no great enthusiam; it is a workmanlike product to entertain one for a while, and then be put back into an appropriately coloured room¹.

Somewhat surprisingly the cover fits the story: a bygone-looking town - likely Gottingen in Germany - with a shady character in the lamp-dark streets carrying some purloined portfolio to an unknown destination. From the cover this could be between the wars, but it was written in 1962, and includes the dangerous border between East and West Germany, so is set about then.

Priestly was born in 1894 and so is antique by the time of this book, and rather comes across as a grumpy old man: the larded-on social commentary towards the end is of the everything's-going-to-the-dogs kind; in some respects he would be regarded now as unenlightened: he even says "poofter" at one point. He is also under the impression that Hamburg doesn't have much nightlife, which seems odd.

The story is a mystery, or a spy thriller, assuming we can discard the social commentary which I did. Our Hero - as tradition demands, tall, strong of arm and of character, down on his luck and yet living in a nice central flat, disappointed in love, clever - is called in by a chum to try to discover who has stolen a piece of paper from an advertising exec's desk. This elaborates into being hit on the head by a Girl, and chasing off to Germany for colour, in a manner to me curiously familiar from Jack Vance in Ecce and Old Earth. In the end - look away now if you want to read it - it turns out that this is both spy and detective-mystery: because Dr Voss who has invented The Shapes of Sleep and therefore interested the admen who want to use them to lull people into buying products, is also a hardened Communist and has been passing info to the East and therefore interested the Spooks; and this combination neatly explains the rather confused Klews which have been scattered through the book. This is... clever, I think, but somehow not terribly interesting. I spare you the society of Antiants, which although he declines the etymology I feel sure is a play on Antients, aka an obsolete form (see Hobbes) of Ancients.

Notes

1. This is a reference to R, who kindly lent it to me; he had bought it because it fit the colour scheme of his "retro room". This is not a criticism of his reading habits. I should perhaps add that if you were to take the book seriously, and go about remembering all the Klews and stuff, it might be harder work. For example, I still don't know why K wanted to offer the UK exec the piece of paper in the first place, or how the US exec came to know about the Shapes, but I'll just glide over that.