Some novels begin as a single scene. Others arrive as a set of questions that refuse to remain separate. Awake Blissfully belongs to the latter kind, and its first two chapters have now moved from conception and planning into an actual, if still early, manuscript.
This is an ambitious project, with several narrative voices, different centuries and a trail of writings whose apparent authority may prove less dependable than their typography. For the moment, the task is not to hurry towards an ending. It is to discover how each layer speaks to the next without allowing the construction to overpower the people caught within it.
London, and the man telling the story
The contemporary story belongs to Julian Merrick, a bartender at The Second Temple, a private Mayfair club in London. He is observant, often amusing, often unpleasant, and rather practised at turning an ordinary incident into evidence of his own significance. Outside the club he deals in rare books and the belongings of the recently deceased. Neither occupation makes him a particularly trustworthy guide.
His world is one of night shifts, expensive surfaces, strained relationships, small dishonesties and the kind of loneliness that can disguise itself as superiority. His voice matters enormously. A reader will encounter these events through a man who has already decided what sort of story he is living in, even when the people around him do not agree.
Four periods, many uncertain witnesses
The apparent mystery reaches backwards through a sequence of documents. Julian acquires an unfinished manuscript composed in 1984 by Leonard G. Pritchard. Pritchard was concerned with a 1932 academic thesis by Emily Bellamy, which in turn examined the reported sleeplessness experiments of the eighteenth-century physician Elias Fenner. The account moves between an alleged experiment in the 1760s, a second vigil in the early 1770s, twentieth-century scholarship and London in 2026.
These layers are not intended simply as exposition delivered through old papers. They raise a problem that interests me far more: how does one establish what happened when every surviving account has passed through the ambitions, fears, omissions and assumptions of another person? A citation may be genuine and still misleading. A memory may be deeply felt and still inaccurate. The authority of a document can become part of the deception.
What the first chapters have established
The opening has given Julian his world and his voice, as well as the ordinary circumstances by which the manuscript reaches him. The next challenge is the slow accumulation of contradictions: between the documents, between what Julian recalls and what others remember, and between the narrative he performs and the experience he cannot wholly control.
Although insomnia and the prolonged deprivation of sleep are central to the fictional research, Awake Blissfully is not being written as a supernatural horror. Its dread grows out of obsession, psychological pressure, unreliable scholarship and the consequences of treating other human beings as material for a theory.
Where the work stands
The first two chapters are in draft. The larger architecture remains under development, and many of the later relationships between the documentary material and Julian’s own history still need to earn their place in the story. This is very much an early work in progress, not a manuscript approaching publication.
There is currently no projected release date. I would rather give this novel the room its structure requires than attach a date to something still finding its proper shape.
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From the writing desk of Tarek von Bergmann.