The Somnambulist (original 2011; edition 2011)

The Somnabulist by Essie Fox is another take on the increasingly popular Victorian gothic melodrama. It concerns Phoebe, the daughter of Maud Turner, who lives with her mother and aunt in the east end of London in the 1880s. The backdrop is Victorian music halls and spiritualism, with the usual (very heavy) dose of family secrets, strange happenings, mysterious characters and misplaced lusts.
Fox has written a real potboiler, I guess trying to emulate the melodramas of Collins and Dickens; convoluted, interwoven plots, where nothing should be taken for granted, but all is revealed in the end. I didn't dislike the book, but I did find the narrative rather wearing after a while; it was as though the author was trying too hard to convince the reader that she had all the gothic ingredients and wasn't afraid to use them generously. Most of the book is told by Phoebe, but there are some stylistically clunky chapters told in the third person, and this compounded an uneven narrative. But on the whole the dialogue was convincing, and most of the characters rang true.
This isn't a badly written book, but I felt that it tried too hard...coincidence after coincidence followed one after the other, and on reflection there was probably one or two too many. It may have been best to have left a few loose ends loose, tying them all up seemed to stretch credibility too far, even allowing for the type of novel it is; the explanatory backstory concerning Mr Stephens is a case in point.
I was drawn to The Somnabulist because of its subject matter and because I love historical fiction, but there are better writers out there doing this sort of stuff - Sarah Waters, Barbara Ewing and Andrew Taylor, to name just a few. Still, I'd definitely read another book by Essie Fox and she's one to watch.
© Koplowitz 2012 ( )

Good depiction of the era and a light read. But plot could have been much tighter. ( )

We've seen quite a number of new books in Victorian style of late, some better than others. Common features include murder, a touch of the supernatural, séances, secluded country houses, dark secrets - all the hallmarks of Victorian gothic. This is a reasonably successful foray into the territory, with a couple of nice extra touches: crusading religion and music hall (nicely antipathetic to each other). There's also some commentary on the mores of the period, in a way that you wouldn't find in a contemporaneous novel, where the author would be more likely to share the prejudices of the characters.

I thought it a little over-long - the pace flagged a bit at one stage, but it does enough to keep you involved nonetheless. On balance, a good read. ( )

Phoebe Turner's Aunt Cissy has always been glamorous and exciting unlike her mum Maud. On a rare visit to the music hall where Cissy is performing she realises there are secrets, and when Cissy dies not long afterwards she begins to understand there are secrets that have something to do with the strangely alluring Nathaniel Samuels.

This was a quick, easy and enjoyable read. ( )

A rather over-the-top novel, this ticks almost all the Gothic Victorian pastiche boxes, apart from the madwoman in the attic. Some of these boxes are a bit squick however (what grown man falls madly in love with a 13 year old?), and it certainly overstays its welcome by the end, with too much plot being crammed in. It definitely needed a tighter ending, it was as if Fox was unable to say goodbye to any of her characters.

If you read it just as an extreme example of Gothic Victorian pastiche though, it can be quite a romp. I am looking forward to her next book to see if she can produce something tighter. ( )