Brief note: The Somnambulist

Any author who starts a novel by warning us that "[t]his book has no literary merit whatsoever" (1) is, to say the least, pushing his luck.  Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist at first looks like it belongs to that mini-subgenre, the historical novel--with or without fantasy elements--about magicians (e.g., The Prestige, Carter Beats the Devil).  Instead, it turns out to be a Mulligan's stew of a parody.  At various points, the novel skewers neo-Victorian fiction (actually, it's set shortly after Queen Victoria's death, which I suppose makes it neo-post-Victorian, or maybe neo-Edwardian...), the detective novel, the Dan Brown-esque thriller, and apocalypto-fic.  The dj tells us that Barnes has a first in English from Oxford, and he tosses in allusions to an equally jumbled assortment of authors and texts, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, Mary Shelley, and Wilkie Collins.   

It's impossible to really summarize the deliberately nutty plot; let's just say that it involves Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Pantisocracy, various and sundry murders, and the possible destruction of London.  The protagonist, Edward Moon, is a down-on-his-luck magician who also has a once-lucrative sideline in detective work.  The titular Somnambulist, who assists Moon in his act, is also a weird golem of sorts who chugs milk endlessly and can't be harmed with swords.  Together, they investigate crimes--badly, it would appear.  (Enter parody of the detective novel.)  Along the way, they have dealings with a number of Secret Societies That Run Everything, including the mysterious Directorate and the equally mysterious Vigilance Committee; moreover, it turns out that the British Library hosts a blind and omniscient Archivist, her existence secret to all but a privileged few, who Knows All.  (Enter parody of Dan Brown.)  Moon stumbles onto a secret church organization that wants to institute Coleridge's Pantisocracy by putting an end to London as we know it.  (Enter apocalypto-fic.)  Unfortunately, things get gummed up quite badly, especially thanks to a pair of supernatural hired assassins who dress up as school boys.  (Enter...um, actually, I haven't the slightest clue what that could possibly be, although it's certainly a different take on the Eton school story.)  All of this is ornamented with a weird gentleman's club, the Underground, and a brothel featuring badly-deformed prostitutes.  (Enter the neo-Victorian novel.) 

The novel's best feature is probably its spectacularly unreliable narrator, who always tells the "absolute, unalloyed truth" (288)--except, of course, when he's lying.  The effect might have been better if there were more clues to the narrator's identity, although the reader soon figures out that he must be fairly high up on the novel's food chain.  For me, at least, the novel took too many potshots at too many contemporary genres; while mysteries, neo-Victorian fiction, Dan Brown, and apocalypto-fic are all ripe for an astute parodist's assault, that assault would make more of a boom! if it concentrated on one target.   By the end, The Somnambulist bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the Frankensteinish Chairman, who lurches about while his constituent parts tumble off or dissolve into slime.  Still, there's enough humor here to suggest that Barnes has a future as a comic novelist or satirist.