The Somnambulist

The Somnambulist is a mashed up stew of Holmes pastiche, occultish mystery, steampunk-ish elements, and just plain weirdness. I thoroughly enjoyed it - read it front to back with only one break, which is unusual for me - especially the unreliable narrator and the surprise at the end when the narrator identity was revealed.

The book has a few novice-author flaws. In spots, I had to backtrack a few lines to picture action as it occurred, and the characters could have been fleshed out just a hair more. Despite this, I highly recommend the book.

The first paragraph of the novel instantly had my attention. I knew I was in for something different. It is difficult to describe a book like this. It isn’t quite what one might expect from the description offered by the publisher. It certainly is a bit of a detective story, but it also flows over into the macabre and fantastic.

Edward Moon, stage magician and detective, is bored of doing magic tricks and reading minds. He has not faced a memorable foe in a very long time, and so even while he pretends to be quite reluctant, he agrees to help the police solve a rather unusual and gruesome murder. What unfolds is a dark and magical tale, one fraught with horrors and conspiracy galore.

The characters lean toward bizarre and show more unbelievable, just as the narrator warns readers at the beginning of the book. Of course, this is what makes them all the more interesting. There is the albino, Skimpole, who nobody seem to like; the ugly man, Thomas Cribb, who is knows much more than he is able to say; the giant, milk guzzling Somnambulist who does not speak; Miss Grossmith, the ever faithful housekeeper; Barabbas the Fiend, who is quite crazed while still brilliant; Mrs. Puggsley, the brothel madam, who serves a clientele with rather special tastes; and Edward Moon, who is past his prime but is not quite ready to let the world forget him.

The narrator’s voice throughout the book is entertaining to say the least. The narrator, however unreliable, was witty and amusing, even with his asides that sometimes had me rolling my eyes. “I expect by now that your disbelief is not so much suspended as dangling from the highest plateau of credulity.” [p334] And with that quote, I found myself nodding in complete agreement.

Although I take no issue with the choice in narrator and actually think it makes for a more interesting twist to the story, my opinion of the narrator was not so high after learning his true identity. The mystery gone and the motive clear, the narrator seemed rather ordinary. Perhaps that was exactly what the author intended.

The Somnambulist is quirky, dark and utterly entertaining. Jonathan Barnes has written a novel that at times will confound the reader and yet everything comes together in the end in unexpected ways. This was one book in which I never guessed what might happen next. show less

If a novel or any other text begins with: "You will be highly disappointed with the quality of this work", then two things happen tend to happen. First of all you will most likely be disappointed with the quality of the work and second you will start to doubt the confidence of the author in his own writing skills. The intended effect 'the book is so amazing that adding this sentence will make it even more wondrous' will not happen since all the reader remembers is 'you will be highly disappointed'. The novel The Somnambulist does just this and more. As a reader you are immediately told that the narrator will tell a lie at least once in the coming chapters. Does this truly setup a novel well? Or is it a plot device intended to make sure show more the big plot twist was already announced and the author can go: see, told you so. Readers usually have no problem gauging the confidence and abilities of an author, we do not have to be explicitly told. Usually mechanisms like the ones discussed here are used by those who are not sure their intended effect will come over and they add insurance in case it doesn't. Why then is this author so unsure about this novel's effect? Surely he has plenty of knowledge and experience, he is after all an Oxford graduate, which we know by reading the back flap of the hardcover edition. A critical piece of information I'm sure.

We follow the adventures of a dubious protagonist by the name of Edward Moon who owns and runs an cabinet of curiosities theater in which he works as an illusionist together with a strange man known to the readers for most of the book as 'The Somnambulist'. Immediately in the beginning of the novel the author draws a parallel with Sherlock Holmes, since in the past Edward Moon, the main character, has solved many complicated criminal cases. Conan Doyle who wrote the Holmes novels understood readers very well, he wasn't unsure about his prose, something we can't say about Jonathan Barnes the author. Doyle used Dr. Watson as an instrument of narration. We saw the world through his eyes, which made the eccentric behavior of Holmes digestible, understandable and most of all entertaining. Edward Moon has the Somnambulist, who in a lot of ways plays the same role, except he doesn't speak. Perhaps a joke on Doyle by Barnes?

If we forgive this misplaced sense of literary humor, we are still left with some very bad character decisions, some major plot holes and a story that is so full of itself that it makes for some difficult reading at times. Holmes would frequently analyze a situation, clarify deep mysteries and most of the time baffle us with amazing feats of detection and deduction. Edward Moon does this just once and feebly at best. Moon later on seems to have lost all his deduction abilities to such extend that he doesn't even recognize his own sister who is sitting next to him in a disguise. Hard to believe for someone who used to be a celebrated sleuth. Any of this odd behavior can not be explained by a later major plot twist which I will not reveal here for those still interested in reading the book. Needless to say from reader's perspective after the twist, the behavior of Moon would still seem suspect to say the least. Even if we take into account that the narrator already told us he would lie. Why?

Three quarters through the book the perspective of the reader changes and we're now reading the story first person perspective through the eyes of Moon's nemesis. Think Moriarty, except less brilliant and not as interesting. If one wants to paint oneself a master of criminal achievements, wouldn't it make sense to make the enemy you just defeated the best there ever lived? Wouldn't you want to ensure that you did not portray your nemesis as an incompetent bungler? Instead, Moon is depicted as someone who bungles from one disaster into another. Through one adventure after another Moon follows a trail of hints and suggestions instead of clues and signs, a character trait that can not be explained by either Moon's nemesis' opinion or the fact that Moon has lost his powers of criminal deduction at his present age.

Besides the many strange decisions in storytelling, the author takes odd liberal allowances for tone of voice. I'm not by any means an expert in Victorian historical fiction, but I'm fairly certain the people living on the streets of 19th century London did not use words like 'prolly', which is better placed in good contemporary chick-lit.

Most reviews I've read state something like "I kept reading for some reason but didn't really like the book, but I could not explain why". I hope to have explained some of the uneasiness readers might have. The novel has some interesting descriptions of people and places, but not enough to give it a good rating. show less

Well, I have to say I did enjoy this book, and for some of the same reasons that others didn't. Most of the characters are a bit off; for most of the book, you have a sense that there's a shadow just out of the corner of your eye that disappears just before you can identify it; there's a bit of science fiction mixed with the supernatural; and Barnes takes his time to paint an admittedly strange picture of the London, it's inhabitants, and the characters in this story. I enjoy all of this, and, given that I'm not a fan of mystery novels, all of these attributes makes "The Somnambulist" stand out as a good read.

My main complaint is that Barnes doesn't feel impelled to explain all of the wierdness/otherworldliness that he writes into his show more characters and events. I can't tell if this is because he feels it adds to the atmosphere of the book, or because there isn't a good explanation. But if you think that reading this book will reveal who and what the Somnambulist is, think again. show less

I’ve been a reader all my life. I majored in English in college and grad school, and I’ve worked in bookstores since 1992, most of that as a buyer. I’m surrounded by books at home and work and I see new ones every day. It’s sometimes difficult to quantify why certain books speak to us; why we pick up this book, but not that one.

Other times, it’s not difficult at all:

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 willfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you’ll believe a word of it.

I don’t know about you, but I’m in love.

With an opening like that, how can I show more not climb on board for the ride? Sure, I understand that this kind of narrator turns some people off (well, I know that; I don’t really understand it). But for me, it’s the sign of an author who wants to play--who wants me as the reader to take a more active role in the story, and I love that. It’s both clever and witty (and neatly kneecaps disgruntled reviewers: I told you it was implausible people, so no complaints!) and nicely sets the tone for the tale to come.

The story itself is everything the narrator promises (with the exception of pedestrian prose—I really liked the writing). You’ve got Edward Moon, stage magician and detective, and his silent partner in both endeavors, the Somnambulist, a giant of a man who never speaks and holds many secrets. You’ve got warm-hearted housekeepers, sybaritic layabouts, spiritualists, gung-ho police inspectors, and freakshow prostitutes. You’ve got grizzly murders, mysterious disappearances, secret societies, shadowy government organizations, the poetry of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the shadow of past mistakes.

It’s a generous, sprawling, maddeningly convoluted story. I just finished it, and I’m still not sure exactly what happened. I can’t wait to read it again and find out, though. show less

The publishers' promotional material compares this to Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norell, and to Neil Gaiman (presumably Neverwhere, though it's not specified.)

It's sort of right. Plotwise it's like neither, of course, though if you reduce either of them to single cartoon sentences it's a bit more plausible. The rather grotesque tone is more like Gaiman than Clarke, and a better comparison than either of these is probably Priest's The Prestige, at least in the early parts of the book.

I enjoyed this book, though I suspect it will have difficulty finding its audience. The fantastic elements are disconnected, lacking a unifying structure; the character of the Somnambulist himself, a man living backwards in time like Merlin, show more possibly genuine mindreading, and steampunk-style technologies all make appearances but are neither connected to one another nor explained. The net result is more similar to magical realism in its "don't try to make sense of this" outlook than to any more systematic fantasy. The writing itself is one of the main joys, as is evident from the first paragraph, as are the characters (well-written, but repulsive almost to a man, like Gormenghast brought to London). The plot is not its strong point, and the wheels fall off in the last few chapters; readers looking for plot-driven work with characters they can wholeheartedly support should look elsewhere, but those with a taste for unreliable narrators and purple-gothic prose will have a fun read. show less

It's been a long time since I've read a book quite as strange as Jonathan Barnes' debut novel The Somnambulist (recently out from William Morrow). Filled with fiendishly odd characters, a whole mess of entirely unexplained subplots, unreliable narrators, shady conspiracies and a healthy dose of the neo-Gothic, this is a bizarre, not-entirely-satisfying volume that does - I think - exactly what it intends to do.

I found The Somnambulist demanded a close read just to keep all the various lines straight (and even then I don't think I quite managed it all the time). It held my attention very well, mainly because I had no idea what was coming next or whose perspective it was going to come from (or which long-dead English poet would suddenly show more appear and start rampaging, Hulk-like, through downtown London).

Incredibly weird, but puzzlingly fun.

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