Matthew Blake's debut novel ‘Anna O’ is superbly twisty

Anna O ****
Matthew Blake
HarperCollins

Medical psychological thrillers are a tough pitch. The facts, the sci-fi mystery, the whodunnit twists, and the characters have to balance each other out without one being more in the foreground than the other. There can be no info dumping, where the reader gets lost in all the facts and jargon. Michael Crichton got it right in a few of his books, and recently Alex Michaelides was praised for doing the same in his best-seller, The Silent Patient.

New on the scene is Matthew Blake, who has made his own foray into the genre with Anna O. 

I asked him to explain the premise of the book when we chatted on Zoom. He says: “Twenty-five-year-old Anna O kills her two best friends while sleepwalking, and then falls into a deep sleep for four years. The case becomes a celebrity sensation around the world. Then Ben Prince, a sleep specialist at the Abbey Sleep Clinic in London, is asked by the ministry of justice to wake Anna up so she can stand trial. We see the story through Ben’s eyes. It’s the biggest case of his career that will make or break him. If he can wake Anna up, he will be on the speaking circuit forever.

“He also has a lot to lose, because his ex-wife Clara was the police detective in charge of the case. His family is steeped in it. Ben has a lot of secrets himself — it’s this idea of the psychologist who can cure everyone except himself. How much we believe him, and to what extent he is telling the truth, is all up for debate.”

Actually, everything is up for debate and scrutiny. Blake is superb at leading the reader down one pathway that could have the answer, but which leads to another place just as bewildering. If a reader can figure out the twists before reaching the end, a tip of the hat to them. 

Blake says this is exactly what he was trying to do: “A big challenge for a thriller writer is that there are so many good books out there — there’s Netflix, there are other thriller films and podcasts, and everyone has been exposed and knows all the many twists and turns. So, to come up with a twist that still shocks people was the bit that took the most work.”

Blake is new to the book publishing industry but is not a novice writer. “ I was a speech writer for politicians. I toyed a bit with being a journalist on a student newspaper, and I’ve also done a bit of screenwriting. Writing a novel was always the absolute peak. I waited until I had a huge idea that could fill 400 pages. That’s when I came across the sleep idea. I realised I had an idea big enough for a book.”

The novel unfolded to him in two parts. “First, I was looking for something universal. I wanted to tap into the anxiety we all have. There’s nothing more universal than sleep. It’s an experience that connects all 8-billion of us on the planet. The average human spends about 33 years of his or her life asleep. But what really happens in that other life? And what is our unconscious truly capable of? I read about all these people who would sleepwalk with their eyes open. Fascinating and so mysterious. Then there are these real-life cases of people who have committed murder while sleepwalking and tried to use that [as a defence] in court.”

The second part of the novel came to him when he learnt about resignation syndrome, which he explains as follows: “It’s where people fall asleep for years on end and cannot be woken up. Resignation syndrome is called a mystery illness or a neurological disease. It is the link between the mind and the body, and how mental distress presents itself in physical stress. Neurologists have been puzzled about what it is and how you cure it. A neurologist called Suzanne O’Sullivan has written amazing books on this mystery illness, and these were the works I delved into.”

Throughout the novel, myths, fairy tales and the classics are brought into play. There’s a bit of Euripides, Sleeping Beauty, Shakespeare, Alfred Hitchcock and Agatha Christie in there. Blake explains why all these texts feature in his novel: “My pet theory is that a lot of the greatest classics, such as Oedipus Rex and Hamlet, are basically crime or mystery stories. They are all tales of murder and mystery and detection. So I wanted to hint at those texts in the book.”