Book Review: Jonathan Barnes: The Somnambulist

I'm not entirely sure what drew me to this book or even if I'd heard of it before I bought it, but I'm sure it was probably the cover and the title. And the cover reeked of Victoriana - it was in the guise of a poster for a magic show and outlined how bereft of literary merit the book was. It was a promising start.

Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrell is an outstanding book, it's a tome, a work of epic proportions delicately planned and intricately detailed. Anything set in Victorian times will remind me vaguely of that. That and Mr Dickens. The somnambulist had a lot to live upto, and Jonathan Barnes, a first-class honours student from Cambridge in English Literature makes a good attempt.

The book has all that you would expect of this genre, interesting characters and scenarios, the dark, grimness of 19th Century London, unsavoury characters and a perpetual influx of beautifully crafted sentences. But it never really quite makes it. The characters are intentionally unlikeable, written with bizarre physical characteristics and odd penchants. And though interesting and varied, I just don't like them, and don't really care if they win or lose. Another obvious comparison would be with Sherlock Holmes who on occasion was an absolute bugger to Watson, but I still liked him, and I liked Watson, and there was always that element of respect to be garnered. The Somnambulist himself is somewhat of an enigma, but also an entirely unnecessary addition, he plays no significant part specific to his character traits and certainly is not the worthy eponym of the novel. Looking from the character arc angle, most are colourful but irrelevant, interesting but fleeting, perhaps needfully so and I do welcome the variety, but I feel that perhaps these could have been fleshed out a little and perhaps had a longer, more useful part in the novel rather than just a series of brief appearences; often they had the air of a new idea that just had to be added to the manuscript, as though the novel grew organically without much redrafting.

Onto the plot. I like the plot, but that is again because of the variety and colour that Barnes has painted it with. There so much to keep you interested. But events and the characters therein are tenuously related, there are a number of loose threads and dead ends that really could've been tied up. The mystery element to the story were never fully realised because the plot moved at such a pace that it never seems to give you that moment to think "what's going on?" or "ahh, that explains that." There were very few mysteries in the first chapters that were tied up in the later chapters and so on. There were some interesting twists, but these were primarily a post-modern angle wherein one was reminded of the fact that this was a story and a patchwork of ideas.

To summarise, I think Mr Barnes is an exceptional wordsmith. His vocabulary is better than most writers and he can build such vivid imagery that I've rarely seen elsewhere. The imaginative aspects of the book are excellent and had this been a 600-page epic I think it would've been a masterpiece. I'd like to draw a comparison to a Victorian freakshow, as that's what this book reminded me off, somewhat fantastical but segmented and non-contiguous, jumping from one colourful scene to the next without that current underlying it; a series of junkie highs. I had the same problem with the recent Danny Boyle film, Slumdog Millionaire, it was an excellent film with a great story but was poorly bound together and paced like a set of long steps puncuated by bland flat landings. I liked The Somnambulist, I found it very readable and enjoyable and criticise it only because there is so much potential. Jonathan Barnes will, I'm sure, mature into an exceptional writer and I will watch his career closely.