Book Review: Jonathan Barnes’ The Somnambulist
March 13th, 2008
Steampunk is The New Big Thing. But, like most literary subgenres (this one a subgenre of fantasy, science-fiction, and historical fiction), it’s not that easy to define. Or, rather, its definition is very open to interpretation. Certainly William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine is an obvious example of steampunk; the novel is, in fact, one of the founding documents of the form. Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age counts as well…yet, so does China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station—and those two novels couldn’t possibly be more different. In fact, the term “steampunk” is being applied rather willy-nilly these days to any literary work that has a Victorian or mock-Victorian influence/style/setting, or some form of anachronistic technology in it.
Jonathan
Barnes’ The Somnambulist matches this loose definition well, but only in one single aspect: its conclusion—of which I shan’t say any more than that it definitely contains a very steampunky sort of anachronistic technological element. The remainder of the novel, however, is something that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and H. P. Lovecraft could’ve written together (had they actually known one another, as in Thomas Wheeler’s The Arcanum) and falls more into the “Victorian fantasy” or “Neo-Victorian” novel classification. Nonetheless, it’s a smashing good read and an excellent example of how effectively an author can combine both first-person and third-person narration to “[t]ell all the Truth but tell it slant.”
The novel may be named The Somnambulist, but the Somnambulist himself is but a secondary character, a sort of mysterious, mute shadow to true protagonist Edward Moon, a stage magician-cum-investigator now, in 1901, fallen on rather hard times. The popularity of Moon’s magical performances (in which his sidekick, the Somnambulist, a golem-like figure whose origins and nature are completely mysterious, features prominently) at his own Theatre of Marvels has been waning for years, and since his disastrous involvement in “that dreadful business in Clapham,” he hasn’t been getting many calls for assistance from the Yard. Yet he eventually finds himself called in to investigate the strange murder of one Cyril Honeyman, a ham actor….
Needless to say, the seemingly random—and very weird—murder of Honeyman eventually leads Moon and his various compatriots into a labyrinthine mystery involving mutated Human Flies, specialist brothels full of sideshow freak prostitutes (most especially a bearded lady named Mina with a vestigial third arm dangling between her breasts), a company called Love, Love, Love, and Love, a strange subterranean world, and the legacy of the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
As in any typical Victorian-esque novel (and The Somnambulist has a very distinctly Dickensian cast to it), along the way, the reader is introduced to a variety of eccentric characters, such as:
- the albino Mr. Skimpole and the hideously scarred Dedlock, administrators and agents for the mysterious (yes, that word is bandied about a lot in this review, because this novel is absolutely saturated in their inexplicable and strange) Directorate, a governmental “black project” designed to stop “eccentric” threats to the city of London;
- a certain ugly Mr. Thomas Cribb, who apparently lives backwards in time like Merlin and is, in some fashion, the genius loci of the City of London;
- the irrepressibly good-natured Detective Merryweather, the counter to gloomy Mr. Moon;
- Barabbas, a loathsome, but wise, toad-like murderer—once connected with Moon and his theatrical act—awaiting execution in the filthy, lightless depths of Newgate Prison;
- Mr. Moon’s dedicated busybody housekeeper Miss Grossmith and her odd, jug-eared beaux Arthur Barge;
- Moon’s sister Charlotte, who goes from busting fraudulent psychics for the city’s Committee of Vigilance to penetrating an organization a thousand times more dangerous than shystering table-tappers;
- the horrifying duo of Boon and Hawker, unstoppable, bloodthirsty supernatural assassins who dress in schoolboy uniforms;
- a gaggle of false Chinamen;
- and the ancient Archivist, a wizened old witch who manages the Stacks, a limitless source of information for the handful of initiates permitted access.
Most mysterious of all is the identity of the narrator, the person telling the story of all these disparate characters and how they are all eventually drawn together to stop a terrifying menace from beneath the streets of London. Is it The Somnambulist? Is it someone completely unknown? A great part of the mystery revolves around Our Humble Narrator’s identity, and author Barnes does a spectacular job of weaving that mystery into all the many other mysteries swirling around London like a plague of psychic nightmares a la Mieville’s slake-moth-borne plague of nightmares in Perdido Street Station.
Many readers may find this novel sloppy and overly indeterminate. Though the Big Mystery of what is threatening Mother London is, of course, resolved, very little else is. Who or what is The Somnambulist? Who or what are the Proctors, Boon and Hawker? What happened at Clapham in Moon’s past, and how was Barabbas and Charlotte involved? Who, indeed, are the Directorate and what are their function in protecting the city? Well…none of this is ever revealed.
Could it be because the narrator is more than just your average unreliable narrator, but a complete lunatic?
Could it be that Barnes is planning a sequel that will address these loose ends?
Or could it be that Barnes is simply playing the Lovecraftian game of atmospherics: leaving certain things unexplained in order to maximize the unsettling, unknowable nature of certain events and characters? I believe that he is both setting himself up for a sequel but also playing against popular conceptions of Victorian mysteries, in which the valiant Investigator (be in Edward Moon or Sherlock Holmes) solves everything with aplomb and diamond-hard deductive logic.
It often seems that Barnes is reveling in all the many forms of “low” fiction popular amongst everyday readers in the first decade of the 20th Century. There are elements of detective fiction, yes, but also elements of cheap, sensational penny dreadfuls, weird fiction, and ghost stories. All of this swirled together produces an engaging, quickly-escalating narrative in which everyone is, at some point another, suspect or revealed to be yet another strange and inexplicable figure. The Somnambulist is a neo-Victorian, pseudo-steampunk frappe made by blending elements from a wide range of genres, subgenres, and subsubgenres together into a tasty, twisted whole that will keep many readers chained to the pages while others stumble away in righteous indignation and confusion as they find their expectations torn to shred and left scattered, meaninglessly, on the cobblestones.
I highly recommend this novel to readers with a taste for the weird and the outre. This is an example of that kind of steampunk/New Weird Fiction (another new subgenre that’s as elusive to pin down as steampunk) that will greatly appeal to readers of China Mieville, Steph Swainston, and even Neil Gaiman—though Gaiman fans, do be warned: there is none of Gaiman’s cliched plot standards or pre-determined conclusions here. Gaiman aficionados looking for a good story with a guaranteed ending* will be severely muddled by the end of The Somnambulist…but those of us who like our fiction atmospheric, allusive, elusive, and beyond the middling strange will find The Somnambulist a wonderful, surprising blast from the past.
Footnotes:
*I’ve always found Gaiman’s fiction to be more about the telling than the story: his plots are always very cliched, constructed from well-known bits of old fairytales, folktales, and assorted other archetypal tropes, and their conclusions are telegraphed from Page One—you always know how a Neil Gaiman piece is going to end from the conclusion of its first chapter. However, Gaiman’s skill lies in making the journey to that foregone conclusion so very enjoyable by employing narrative tricks and storytelling skills that manage to hold onto the reader’s attention despite the tried-and-true subjects of his stories.
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