Young Jonathan Barnes, a few years out of Oxford University and now a reviewer for the Times Literary Supplement, puts his reading to good use in "The Somnambulist."
A danse macabre
A magician in 19th-century London whose brilliant career is fading is asked to look into a suicide, and the plot thickens.
By MARX SWANHOLM
February 2, 2008 at 12:06AM
Set in London around the turn of the previous century, Barnes' novel incorporates many of the weirder elements of 19th-century literature and thought. The ghosts of Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins and Mary Shelley dance merrily through, kicking up Victorian fascinations with the occult, utopias and Galvanism -- the belief that life might be created or restored through Frankensteinian electrical charges.
Brooding over this danse macabre are the persona and poetry of the great, long-dead poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose "eternal power" -- trust me -- lives on in the novel in more ways than one.
At the center of the story is Edward Moon, a magician who performs at the Theatre of Marvels and lives in the building's cellar with his faithful housekeeper and his stage partner, the Somnambulist, a more than 8-foot-tall giant who can't or chooses not to speak and drinks only milk. Moon is a prickly man with mysterious gifts whose once brilliant career has begun a gentle decline despite his well-publicized avocation of solving some of London's most sensational crimes.
When a man is discovered dead in the street from a fall from a high window, the police sense something more mysterious than suicide and ask Moon to look into the case. Moon's inquiries attract the attention of a shadowy government agency called the Directorate, which has reason to believe that there is a plot afoot to destroy London. Soon Moon is working both cases under coercive threats from the Directorate man, a frail albino named Skimpole.
Other characters with Dickensian names and freakish qualities pop up: Cribb, a man who seems to know all of London's past and future; Barabbas, the fiendish genius; Mrs. Puggsley, madam of a fetishistic brothel; Madame Innocenti, the medium; Boon and Hawker, a pair of savage murderers dressed in the blazers and short pants of public schoolboys.
In this gallery of grotesques, the Somnambulist himself remains a minor character, adding little to the novel but his name. But perhaps that is to be expected in a novel that tries so hard to confound expectations. After all, its narrator warns us on page 1 that the story is merely a bit of implausible nonsense with "no literary merit whatsoever."
These are apt self-criticisms, it turns out, for, despite some humorous moments, "The Somnambulist" is not half as clever as it pretends to be.
