Famously plucked from the Gollancz slush pile and now adorned with the kind of word of mouth and marketing spend that would make more established authors jealous, The Somnambulist is the first novel by Jonathan Barnes. Set in a Fantastical Victorian London reminiscent of that of Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, the book is intended as a knowingly over-the-top romp full of murder, mystery, magic and mayhem but is, in truth, a work of considerable cynicism and unbridled laziness.
Edward Moon is a stage magician and a private investigator. Once the toast of London Society for his astonishing show and feats of detection, Moon is now a dejected shadow of the man he once was. Facing tumbling receipts and shame from his last botched case, he has taken to bouts of Holmesian boredom and twenty-first century ennui. However, rather than turn to cocaine, Moon has developed a taste for deformed prostitutes much to the distaste of his housekeeper and the Somnambulist, the eight-foot mute with strange powers who serves as his assistant. However, when the bodies of rich men start turning up, Moon senses a case worthy of his skills. That is until it becomes clear that there is considerably more afoot than murder most foul and Moon gets forced into helping out a shadowy government organisation known as the Directorate in their battle to stop an evil law firm bent on bringing Colleridge’s political dream of pantisocracy to life in the middle of London.
The first third of the book is devoted to a study of the character of the engaging and sympathetic Edward Moon. As with Christopher Priest’s The Prestige (1995) and Neil Burger’s film The Illusionist (2006), Barnes’ stage magician stands between two worlds. A successful stage magician is one who is able to pass himself off as a latter-day Prospero by harking back to a pre-scientific age of wonder and miracle. However, this effect is only made possible by drawing upon knowledge of the real and very much scientific worlds of engineering and psychology. However, unlike the characters in The Illusionist and The Prestige, Moon is not a scientist. In fact, his magic show appears to be entirely dependent upon the Somnambulist’s decidedly real ability to be impaled on a sword without feeling any ill effects whatsoever. Indeed, unlike the characters from the works of Moore, Priest or Burger, Moon’s modernity is more psychological than philosophical.
As Mike Atkinson argues in the April 2007 issue of Sight and Sound, American independent film has become self-indulgently introspective and decadently prone to recycling the language of previous eras as means of expression. In particular, Atkinson is thinking of “crisis of conscience” films such as Brick, A Scanner Darkly or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. Each of these films is significant as they each take an existing genre and subvert the internal values of the genre to make it about an internal psychological struggle rather than an external one. Rian Johnson’s high school detective story Brick is particularly salient here as, much like the beginning of The Somnambulist, it is a story about someone trying to solve themselves by solving a murder. Moon is a man who is haunted by failed cases and failed friendships of the past and trapped in a failing career as a stage magician. He does not need to solve a case because it is the right thing to do... he needs to solve a case because it is only through the act of detection that he can re-connect with the person he thinks he should be. In short, Moon is a thoroughly modern character trapped in a Victorian world.
Unsurprisingly, this kind of anachronism is not unusual. For example, in the cases of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle and James Morrow’s The Last Witchfinder, modern language, ideas and characterisation were imported in order to make the characters and setting more sympathetic and engaging to a modern audience. However, in both of those cases, the desire for accessibility was balanced with a desire to write about the period in which the books are set. All four books investigate the same period because they treat it as the crucible in which the modern world was forged. However, Barnes lacks a similar interest in the Victorian period. His Victorian London not only lacks the kind of historical figures and events that normally populate SFnal period works but it also lacks any discussion or interest in the Victorian period as a cultural or historical artefact. Indeed, upon searching through the book just now I was hard pressed to point to any piece of dialogue or thinking that would not have been equally at home in a contemporary setting, compare this to period genre work such as Jo Walton’s Farthing which drips period expressions and modes of thought from every page. Barnes’ interest in Victoriana seems to be strictly aesthetic, serving only as a vaguely appropriate canvas onto which he projects his grotesques and freaks.
The result is not initially unpleasant. In fact, a hundred pages in I was more excited by this book than I have been by anything I have read in a while. The first hundred pages drip with mystery and weirdness and the promise of an occult detective story glazed with Victoriana and an arch postmodern sensibility. But then things start to go wrong... very... very wrong.
The rot sets in when Moon attends a cocktail party and encounters a man who claims to be travelling backwards in time from the future and therefore claims to know the entire future of London, this raises the possibility of some Anubis Gates-style time travelling fun. The time traveller greets Moon like an old friend and expresses great sadness when Moon understandably gives him the brush off, thereby suggesting that we might see Barnes play with the idea of a relationship where one party is living the relationship in reverse. The problem is that while this character promises much, he delivers nothing, showing up a couple more times to dump some plot-juice on Moon before disappearing.
To be blunt, from the beginning of the second act onwards, Barnes starts introducing weird ideas and characters with such frequency that none of them has time to breathe giving them the distinct flavour of weirdness for weirdness’ sake. This deluge of surrealism escalates until the book reaches its climax whereupon the streets of London are filled with corpses and pitched battles between police, spies dressed as music hall china-men, fanatical lawyers and undead schoolboy assassins whilst an eight foot mute slugs it out with the reanimated, acid-dripping corpse of Samuel Taylor Colleridge. Gonzo in itself is not problematic, what makes this cavalcade of whimsy so tedious is that at no point are any of these ideas developed with any care or thought. By the end of the book, Barnes is content just throwing weirdness at the reader is a desperate attempt to distract them from the fact that the book has lost any semblance of plot or characterisation.
Aside from Moon (who gets all of his characterisation in before the second act), The Somnambulist’s characters are drawn only in the broadest of possible strokes. An example of one of the more profound pieces of characterisation is the spy-master Mr. Skimpole. A sinister albino serving a shadowy government organisation, Skimpole accidentally drinks a poisoned cup of tea. This leads to him spending the rest of the book being about to die. However, rather than have him reassess his life or maybe explore his mental state as the end grows near, Barnes decides to give Skimpole a pathos-inducing crippled son. The son serves no purpose in the plot other than to humanise Skimpole by having him go “Aaaieeee! I am dying... I want to be with my boy”. Childish, manipulative and frankly insulting, this is actually one of the better pieces of characterisation. In the case of the other characters, Barnes either resorts to obfuscation and innuendo (the Somnambulist) or jack-knife re-inventions (the boyfriend of Moon’s housekeeper). However, as creaky as the characterisation is, it is not the worst casualty of Barnes’ inattention to detail.
Given the content of the first act you could fairly expect this book to be a detective story. As I mentioned earlier, the early investigations and the establishment of Moon’s character are all trappings of the detective genre. From Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot, to Fitz from Cracker to obsessive-compulsive TV detective Adrian Monk... all are flawed humans and all are great detectives. The problem is that once Barnes has established that there is a vast conspiracy at work, he seems to lose interest and the book degenerates into a particularly sub-par James Bond film. Moon never detects anything, he never has to work things out or deduce things like Holmes does... he just has a few meetings and then a big battle breaks out. Simply put, this book lacks the plot required to be a convincing detective story.
The book opens with this message, which also features in lieu of a blurb on the back cover.
“Be warned, this book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, people by unconvincing characters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently ridiculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you’ll believe a word of it. Yet I cannot be held wholly accountable for its failings. I have good reason for presenting you with so sensational and unlikely an account. It is all true.” [Page 1]
The narrator then goes on to explain how he is but a humble journalist, unaccustomed to telling such stories and lacking the skills to properly enthral the readers. This paragraph serves two purposes.
Firstly, it introduce the literary device of an unreliable narrator (a device used far more elegantly in Jo Walton’s Farthing and with greater intelligence in Peter Watts’ Blindsight). This kind of device has been around since the days of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales so it is not a particularly new or interesting conceit. The problem is that Barnes then does absolutely nothing at all with the idea until then end when, almost as an after-thought we learn that the narrator was in fact the chief narrator. So as with the plot, the characters and most of the other ideas, Barnes likes the idea of writing a book with an unreliable narrator but he then immediately loses interest and fails to develop the idea further. This is related to the second purpose served by the opening paragraph.
By having his narrator not only criticise the book but also question his own reliability, Barnes is attempting to be clever and get the criticisms of the book in before anyone else has a chance. This desire to be clever, even at the cost of authenticity, suffuses the book with a tone that is as smug as it is arch. By opening with a literary device and closing with a piece of obfuscatory speculation about the Somnambulist’s true identity, Barnes is desperately trying to show how clever and knowing he is. The problem is that by the end of the book the graveyard of abandoned ideas is practically over-flowing. Had the book not been written by someone with the attention span of an over-caffeinated goldfish then The Somnambulist might have competed with the likes of Mark Gatiss’ Lucifer Box novels as a period detective story. Had Barnes chosen to develop his embryonic ideas about the mythology of London then he might well have had a book comparable to Gaiman’s American Gods or Neverwhere. Instead we have a book that is little more than a smug avalanche of increasingly tedious whimsy. This is not just a tragedy, it is an outright travesty.
At last! A sanity check! I just finished The Somnambulist last night with more questions than answers. This book left me unsatisfied and disappointed. I enjoyed the beginning of this story and was settling in to what I thought would be an enjoyable read. The next thing I knew, I was overwhelmed with characters and situations and I became more and more puzzled. By the time the Prefects came along, nothing made much sense any more and I had ceased to try to connect anything. The "lie" the narrator admits to was a trifle in the greater scheme of things and, by the time the narrator made his reasons clear for summoning Moon, I had ceased to care. I continued reading until the end just to see whether or not the narrator, at the last moment, would reveal something earthshaking that would make the conglomeration of characters come together somehow. That never happenend - at least not for me. I'm enjoying perusing your site; this is my first time here. I found you while searching for reviews of The Somnambulist. I'll be a frequent visitor!
Posted by: Pat Elliott | April 10, 2008 at 04:39 AM
I agree entirely with the fact that it could have been so much better and that there were more questions than answers and that the answers were usually full of holes, but I can't pretend I didn't enjoy the book. Whatever faults this book has, it still held my attention for the whole time I read it and left me feeling excited when I finished.
Can't deny being biased though, I'm obsessed with books full of querky characters.
Posted by: Havoc | May 06, 2008 at 09:22 PM