ISBN: 9780575079427
Jonathan Barnes
The Somnambulist
Publisher: Gollancz
Paperback 288 pages
Date of publication: 22/02/2007
“Be warned. This book has no literary merit whatsoever. It is a lurid piece of nonsense, convoluted, impausible, peopled by unconvincing chararcters, written in drearily pedestrian prose, frequently rediculous and wilfully bizarre. Needless to say, I doubt you’ll believe a word of it.” What is the reader suppose think if this is the opening paragraphy? Not knowing what to make of it I read on and was taken into a dark, sometimes disturbing London at the turn-of-the-20th-century. Our protagonists, Edward Moon and his companion, the Somnambulist, are introduced to us as a result of a murder, first of two, which occurs only pages into the tale. We are drawn further into the tale after realising there is more to these grissly events than meets the eye. Along the journey our protagonists meet the wicked albino Skimpole, a kind of reverse psychic , Cribb, who claims to be living his life backwards, amiable assassins Hawke and Boone and the activities of a secret government agency known as the Directorate. Our narrator occassionly interupts his story to engage the reader directly, offering opinions and suggestions and as the events unfolded this style of storytelling started to make sense.
