I was quite looking forward to reading The Somnambulist after having read about it. Then I heard that Jonathan Barnes had written a Sherlock Holmes audio drama called The Adventure of the Perfidious Mariner and that he was a big Doctor Who fan which made me want to read it all the more.
“Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever,” admonishes the narrator in the first paragraph. Describing his own tale as “nonsense” and “wilfully bizarre”, he doubts the reader will believe a word of it. Having warned us, we learn that our humble narrator is less than reliable as he warns, “I ought to admit that I shall have reason to tell you more than one direct lie.”
With such an introduction we are thrust into Edwardian London. The story here concerns Edward Moon, a magician whose fame is fleeting and also a detective who assists the London constabulary on occasion. His partner on and offstage is the titular character, a giant of a man with no hair, cannot speak, and is impervious to attacks with edged weapons. Oh, and he loves milk. The pair are enlisted, or perhaps drawn, to investigate the death of an actor who went up to the see the etchings of a lady of the night but ended up seeing an apparition of his mother and being defenestrated by an eldritch lizard creature.
As odd as all this sounds, things only get stranger. Moon is aided in his investigations by an elderly woman who works at the British Museum. Known only as The Archivist, she furnishes Moon with plenty of information and knows more about things than she lets on. He also meets up with a gentleman named Thomas Cribb who is much older than he appears and seems to have the gift of time travel. There's also a mysterious cult, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and his legacy, a mysterious chthonian dreamer, an X-Files-like branch of the British government called The Directorate, two “Prefects” who are summoned from a black address book and are perhaps the ultimate assassins, and more.
I suppose this makes The Somnambulist Victorian fantasy or some such thing. Some readers may be put off by the fact that most of these characters are never fleshed out nor are their fantastic natures explained. There just seems to exist this phantasmagorical shadow world which is known only to a few select individuals. I didn't mind the lack of explanation, for the most part, and was content on letting Barnes construct his world as he saw fit. However, I was disappointed that The Somnambulist himself got rather short shrift. The book bears his name yet he is absent from most of the story. When he is present, he's like Gromit, asking some questions but mostly rolling his eyes at his friend. In Barnes' defense, The giant does return at the end of the story in what is surely an open ending.
I'm reluctant to divulge much of the plot but will say that the mystery of the defenestrated man becomes plural and leads to a grander scheme into which Moon is thrust. The Directorate forces his hand. Cribb seems to know rather a lot and attempts to push Moon in the right direction but ultimately cannot come clean owing to his rather unique temporal position. There's also a Hannibal Lecter type character in Barabbas. Locked up in Newgate Prison, he offers up a clue or two but he also adds to the mystery of our protagonist. Like most of the characters here, we don't find out a lot about Moon. He and Barabbas have a history and there are multiple references to a case of Moon's that apparently went awry but his life is, for the most part, shrouded in mystery. Oh, we do learn that he frequents a brothel with fetish appeal. For Moon, a bearded lady does the trick.
I should also mention that Barnes does eventually divulge the identity of our unreliable narrator in a nice, if unexpected, twist. He gives the reader occasional asides which remind us that the narrator is somehow involved in the plot but we are never truly pointed to the identity of the fabulist. At one point this person admits to having lied to the reader but the trick seems absent from most of the story. I suppose that I could have missed some prevarications but I tend to think that Barnes just decided to leave the ploy mostly unused. This doesn't hurt the book by any means but I'd rather have liked it if there was more unreliability.
If I were to be critical of Barnes then I suppose it would be because his narrative style doesn't seem linked to a theme. Sleeping and dreaming are the most obvious motifs. We have the chthonian dreamer, the narrator's dream in the final chapter, and the title character. But there is also the dream which is not a movie that plays in our heads while asleep. There's the dream as a goal and here the cult dreams to change the world to fit its vision. I suppose having an unreliable narrator can be commentary on this latter type of dream since they are consciously directed.
Regardless of any disjunction between style and theme, The Somnambulist is a wonderful journey into a rather seedy world where the supernatural bleeds into our reality. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Who, especially stories penned by Robert Holmes, Mary Shelley, and H.P. Lovecraft stick out as influences. Barnes' follow-up, The Domino Men, is reputed to be a very indirect sequel to The Somnambulist so that's the next book for me.
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