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Summary
Summary
The Somnambulist
Author Notes
Jonathan Barnes has a BSc in Biological Sciences from the University of Sussex. He has been writing since the age of 21 and under a pseudonym has published four novels. He cam across the Bates method in 1983 and, as a wearer of glasses himself, decided to investigate it from a biologist's viewpoint. He found it logical and consistent, and since practising it has been able to improve his eyesight and discard his glasses.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (6)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Set in Victorian London, this superb debut from British author Barnes raises the bar for historical thrillers, starting with its curious opening line: "Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever." A page-turner, it's full of peculiar characters, notably Edward Moon, a highly unorthodox detective, and Moon's bizarre sidekick, known only as the Somnambulist. Moon, "a conjuror by profession" whose act has fallen on hard times, has cracked some of the city's most notorious murders. Now, he's leading the investigation into a shadowy religious group aiming to overtake London and do away with its oppressive, bourgeois tendencies. Moon is a remarkable invention, a master of logic and harborer of all sorts of unnatural habits and mannerisms. The Somnambulist-a giant, milk-swigging mute-doesn't appear to be human at all, yet serves as Moon's moral as well as intellectual compass. Together, they wend their way through a London rich in period detail. Barnes saves his best surprise for the story's homestretch, when he reveals the identity of his narrator, who's been cleverly pulling strings since the opening. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* First-novelist Barnes throws an Edwardian magician at a noir world of undercover agents, hard-boiled cops, and dystopian cults; gives his hero some colorful, circus-character cohorts and a golem/avatar protector; and manages to produce in the process a remarkably entertaining horror/mystery/historical/comic novel that fans of any of those genres won't want to miss. Edward Moon, conjurer and part-time detective, and his silent somnambulist (that's the golem protector) are called upon to investigate two bizarre murders. Instead of identifying a crazed killer, they unveil a meshed system of government corruption and an underground cult devoted to bringing London to its knees and establishing a pantisocracy based on a utopian ideology created by poet Samuel Coleridge and his friend and fellow poet Robert Southey. An often nonsensical nightmare quality to the fast-paced action accentuates the characters' mystification as they plunge from fright to frightful in an effort to stem the gruesome and inexorable tide of evil. Like Poe and likewise Lemony Snicket Barnes begins his novel with a disclaimer about its lack of literary merit, and in some ways, he's right: underdeveloped characters and subplots, along with implausible and sometimes ridiculous premises do get in the way of all the energy. But not all that much. Barnes is up to something very special here. He's created a new genre, really, a graphic novel written in longhand, and it combines the subtle horror of Patricia Highsmith, the goofy gore of Christopher Moore, and the cartoon action of the TV series Heroes. Read for the sheer fun of it.--Baker, Jen Copyright 2007 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
Peter Robinson is a good, gray writer who, while lacking a dazzling literary style, brings much sober intelligence and technical skill to the plotting of his police procedural series featuring Detective Chief Inspector Alan Banks and various colleagues in the Eastvale constabulary. While all that well-hammered craftsmanship can feel a bit leaden, Robinson always tells a dandy story. And when he chooses - to challenge himself or merely to sate the current publishing appetite for supersized mysteries with bloated plots - he can even tell two stories at once, as is the case in FRIEND OF THE DEVIL (Morrow, $24.95). The more accessible mystery concerns the brutal rape and murder of 19-year-old Hayley Daniels, a headstrong girl who made a fatal detour into a labyrinth of courtyards and alleyways known as the Maze after a Saturday night pub crawl. As Banks and his team follow the methodical procedures appropriate for an up-to-date police force, Robinson turns the investigation into a variation on the classic locked-room puzzle - a treat for readers capable of looking beyond the back story to focus on the carefully laid out forensic evidence. Less easily resolved, but more original and intriguing, is the parallel investigation conducted by Banks's emotionally twitchy colleague and onetime lover, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbot. Annie is looking into the homicide of a woman whose throat was slashed as she sat helplessly in a wheelchair at the edge of a cliff overlooking the North Sea. Once the victim is revealed as a notorious murderer who eluded justice in a previous Robinson novel, the hunt for her killer opens up pitch-black but psychologically rich territory. If the dead woman was, according to Banks, "a complex and interesting killer," what does that make her assassin? Fiendishly clever and efficient, actually, but not as interesting a player as one would expect from Robinson, who reserves the full character treatment for his protagonists. Longtime fans of the series may be pleased with the exacting attention paid to Banks's latest romance, or to the midlife crisis that has Annie hitting the bottle. And as always, Robinson shows compassion for the victims of crime and their survivors. But anyone coming fresh to this series might wonder why he takes only perfunctory interest in the psychology of his villains. Talk about gilding the lily! It was evidently not enough for Maisie Dobbs, the heroine of four thoughtful and moving period mysteries by Jacqueline Winspear, to have studied at Edinburgh's prestigious medical college, served as a battlefield nurse in France during World War I and returned to England to establish a successful practice as a psychologist and private investigator. In AN INCOMPLETE REVENGE (Holt, $24), the already amazing Maisie must now answer the call of heretofore ignored Gypsy blood (on her maternal grandmother's side) to win the trust of a Romany band that has set up camp outside a village in Kent for the 1931 hop-picking season. While investigating incidents of arson and vandalism hindering a client's acquisition of a local brickworks, Maisie unearths secrets that date back to the war. But her detective work, like her prescient sense of the rising mood of Fascism, would be more impressive if she didn't have to dance around a campfire to arrive at her insights. Jonathan Barnes puts a perfectly good Oxford education to mischievous misuse in THE SOMNAMBULIST (Morrow, $23.95), a cheeky tale constructed largely of parts salvaged from the sensationalist novels of the past three centuries. Lurching out into the world like Dr. Frankenstein's monster, the narrative presents itself as a gaslight thriller, à la Wilkie Collins, about a stage magician-cum-detective, Edward Moon, who is investigating the mysterious deaths of London gents slumming in the city's Dickensian fleshpots. Swerving down "grisly and gothic and bizarre" pathways to matters of mind control and mass hysteria, the story embraces the more lurid Grand Guignol style of Monk Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe. And once this melodrama descends to the subterranean hell of the London sewers, we are trapped in the supernatural horrors of H. P. Lovecraft. While some readers may be dismayed by the novel's lack of logic or coherence, it doesn't take an English-lit wonk to appreciate the antic mind that would name two of the grotesquely deformed prostitutes in Mrs. Puggsley's brothel after virginal victims of Count Dracula - and find a role in these shenanigans for Coleridge. For all her impressive command of the action in JUDAS HORSE (Knopf, $23.95), April Smith couldn't write a stock thriller if she tried. Even in this feverishly pitched adventure - which finds F.B.I. Special Agent Ana Grey working under cover in Oregon to infiltrate a cell of domestic terrorists posing as animal rights activists - the psychology is too complex and the moral issues are too ambiguous to pass as conventional thriller material. As Ana learns, undercover work brings out "someone criminal, the shadow side of me." Smith also writes too well to settle for the mindless shootouts of a plot geared to summon armed-to-the-teeth SWAT teams at the least provocation. With every dynamic scene, including a wild mustang roundup that thunders right off the page, the reader, like Ana, is reminded of the lost ideals and divided loyalties that make these mortal conflicts so bloody - and so sad. If one of the victims in Peter Robinson's novel was an 'interesting killer,' what does that make her assassin?
Guardian Review
The Victorian era lends itself to fantastical literature, and in recent years there has been a surge of novels set in the 19th century. The Somnambulist is one of the best. Edward Moon is a conjuror and amateur detective with the strangest sidekick in fiction: the Somnambulist, an 8ft-tall mute who communicates via a chalkboard and can survive being run through with swords. One of the novel's many delights is the cast, a veritable rogues' gallery: Skimpole, the immoral albino; Cribb, an ugly seer of the future who lives his life backwards; the sadistic duo Hawker and Boon, assassins who dress as public schoolboys. The plot is complex and helter-skelter, and Barnes plays with the reader's expectations: is this a detective novel, an occult thriller, a horror yarn, or all three? It's certainly a grotesque and compelling debut. Caption: article-sf10.2 The Victorian era lends itself to fantastical literature, and in recent years there has been a surge of novels set in the 19th century. The Somnambulist is one of the best. - Eric Brown.
Kirkus Review
Turn-of-the-20th-century London is reimagined as a busily embattled hell on earth in Oxford graduate Barnes's insistently eventful debut novel. Shades of Alan Moore's The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Caleb Carr's The Alienist, Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere and Kim Newman's Dracula-inflected Victoriana surround the hectic plot, which is introduced by an unnamed narrator (whose identity, once revealed, may or may not surprise you) who warns that the story we're about to read is sheer nonsense and that he is not to be trusted. How can the preempted reviewer compete? Perhaps by summarizing a hyperbolic narrative that opens with the savage murder of a wealthy dilettante-actor (the first of two similarly baffling crimes), followed by the introduction of blas stage magician and defrocked detective Edward Moon and his assistant, the eponymous somnambulist, who's eight feet tall, bald all over and a mute who communicates with Moon through amusingly misspelled messages written on a chalkboard. Symbolic suggested connections between the moon and sleep multiply, notably when a character known as "the Sleeper" enters the action. He has lots of company, including the wicked albino Skimpole (a nod to Dickens), a kind of reverse psychic (Cribb) who claims to be living his life backwards, amiable assassins Hawke and Boone and the activities of a secret government agency known as the Directorate, engaged in monitoring the machinations of a powerful law firm devoted to the creation of an anti-governmental "pantisocracy" (based on one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's loonier notions). Barnes's energetic prose is an efficient vehicle for presenting one outrageous character or situation after another. Alas, they are legion, and are only infrequently successfully integrated into the plot. Racing through this daft melodrama is like topping off a slice of pecan pie with a chocolate pizza. It is fun going down, but chances are you'll hate yourself in the morning. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Who is the Somnambulist? The character (like the novel) is festooned with layer upon layer of oddities. Not only is he a mute giant who is invulnerable to weapons and addicted to milk, but he also sleeps in a bunk bed, is completely bald, and glues a wig to his head every day. His partner, the magician and private detective Edward Moon, sleeps in the other bunk bed, dallies with bearded ladies of the evening, and has a mysterious past. In fact, nearly everyone in the turn-of-the-century Victorian London depicted here has a mysterious past, except for Mr. Cribb, who has a mysterious future because his life runs backward in time. Despite this, Barnes's literary debut doesn't come across as jokey or as an obvious parody-it takes itself seriously enough to be a compelling and entertaining read on its own merits. A reader of Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Wilkie Collins is likely to find plenty to wink at, but the story works on many levels. Highly recommended for public libraries.-Jenne Bergstrom, San Diego Cty. Lib. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
The Somnambulist Chapter One Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, implausible, peopled 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. Every word of what follows actually happened, and I am merely the journalist, the humble Boswell, who has set it down. You'll have realised by now that I am new to this business of storytelling, that I lack the skill of an expert, that I am without any ability to enthral the reader, to beguile with narrative tricks or charm with sleight of hand. But I can promise you three things: to relate events in their neatest and most appropriate order; to omit nothing I consider significant; and to be as frank and free with you as I am able. I must ask you in return to show some little understanding for a man come late in life to tale-telling, an artless dilettante who, on dipping his toes into the shallows of story, hopes only that he will not needlessly embarrass himself. One final thing, one final warning: in the spirit of fair play, I ought to admit that I shall have reason to tell you more than one direct lie. What, then, should you believe? How will you distinguish truth from fiction? Naturally, I leave that to your discretion. The Somnambulist . Copyright © by Jonathan Barnes. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold. Excerpted from The Somnambulist by Jonathan Barnes All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
