The Domino Men by Jonathan Barnes

The Domino Men is a semi-sequel to Jonathan Barnes' debut The Somnambulist which I finished reading recently. I say "semi-" because it takes place in the same world as The Somnambulist and features a handful of the same characters but the events happen 100 or so years later and one needn't have read the first book to understand its successor.

Edward Moon and his giant associate are gone. In their place is a young man by the name of Henry Lamb, a file clerk at the Civil Service Archive Unit. The story begins in the manner of a Lovecraftian confession like "The Statement of Randolph Carter": "I'm horribly aware, as I sit at the desk in this room that you've lent me, that time is now very short for me indeed." This narrator goes on to recount the hideous fate that befalls a young woman in the Tooting Bec area of London in 1967, which will be familiar to readers of The Somnambulist. The scene then changes to the present where Lamb's grandfather falls into a coma and, since his mother constantly refers to the old man as a bastard, Henry is the only family the slumbering patient has. With the looming threat of losing his grandfather, Henry makes sure to visit him in the hospital. On one visit as he's leaving, a window washer plummets to ground at his feet and gasps, "The answer is yes."

This incident begins to become comprehensible once Henry is recruited by The Directorate, that shadowy, Torchwood-like organization that led by Mr. Dedlock who has been a loyal member for well over 100 years now. Dedlock recruits Henry because of his grandfather and a whole chapter of Lamb family history is slowly revealed. Dear old grandpa was formerly in Dedlock's employ and The Directorate has been locked in a game of cat and mouse with the House of Windsor for well over a century. Queen Victoria made a Faustian bargain with a baleful power which came to her in a dream and now the time has come to pay the piper with the fate of London and all its inhabitants at stake. Hawker and Boon, the supernatural hit men from The Somnambulist, return and are in the thick of things.

While I missed the gaslight and the gentle, enigmatic giant of The Somnambulist, The Domino Men was still extremely enjoyable and mysterious in its own ways. Barnes does a good job of invoking some Lovecraftian terror while he slowly lets the mystery unfold with a dash of gleeful sadism thrown in for good measure as torture scenes and many gory deaths can attest to. Hawker and Boon didn't get many pages in the previous book but are wonderful here with their gruesome Loki act. Much to Barnes' credit, he doesn't offer much in the way of explanation about them. Instead suspense around the pair builds as various members of The Directorate talk about how evil they are until the murderous twins are free to go on another psychotic rampage. Dedlock is very old here and, curiously enough, now sports gills and directs his organizations activities from a rather large tank of water. Again at no point are we offered explanation for his state.

The ending was something of a surprise for me. It ties the opening together with the unconventional narrative style that Barnes adopted. Henry's telling of events is often interrupted by a malevolent narrator. This unknown fabulist commences by saying, "Henry Lamb is a liar." Our protagonist tells of the Windsor vs. Directorate conflict from the agency's side while this other voice details events from the Windsor viewpoint. We learn of how Prince Arthur – heir to the throne – is conscripted into the battle to carry on the Windsor part of the bargain. I found this stylistic device to be fun although one can surely make an argument that it is superfluous and that Henry could have uncovered this same material himself.

The problem with this is that Henry Lamb is perhaps the least interesting character in the book. He reminded me of Bob Howard, the hero of Charles Stross' Laundry Files series in that both characters are fish out of water and thrust into roles by secret organizations which force them to be heroes. The big difference is that Henry has no hacking skills. Another contrast is that Bob's skills imbue him with an air of authority and a sense that he's better than most while Henry suffers from being a passive-aggressive figure that's annoying too often. Some of the time he uses his brain and asserts himself while at others he is like a bumbling, awkward teenager that is being taken along for the ride. Edward Lamb was a mysterious fellow who had a fetish for bearded women and kept some interesting company. Henry Lamb, on the other hand, is rather plain and interesting only by virtue of those around him.

Despite having an uninspiring protagonist, Barnes manages to make The Domino Men fun through his willingness to methodically drop clues to a harrowing mystery and to surround Henry with more interesting characters. Plus there's some dark humor provided by the Domino Men themselves and some jabs at life working in an office.

While I liked The Somnambulist more, I am very hesitant to call The Domino Men a misstep and am very much looking forward to hearing Barnes' take on Sherlock Holmes.

The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes

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.