The Domino Men

by Jonathan Barnes

A young man discovers a manuscript and so begins a bizarre tale that brings together his grandfather, every conspiracy theory you've ever heard about the royal family and the true story about where the power of Number 10 really lies. Readers of The Somnambulist may well recoginise the characters kept within a chalk circle in a cellar beneath Downing Street. With a gallery of vividly grotesque characters, a gleefully satiric take on modern life and a playful and highly literate style, this is an amazingly readable literary fantasy. In his sequel to the crazed Victoriana of The Somnambulist Jonathan Barnes brings his invention, reality, grotesquerie and curiosities bang-up-to-date.

• ISBN10: 0575079436
• ISBN13: 9780575079434
• Publish Date: 21 February 2008
• Publish Status: Out of Print
• Out of Print: 31 July 2009
• Publish Country: GB
• Imprint: Gollancz
• Format: Hardcover
• Pages: 288
• Language: English

Reviews

[empressbrooke]

The Domino Men is the follow-up to Jonathan Barnes' [b:The Somnambulist|2016005|The Somnambulist|Jonathan Barnes|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/414PUSYVm1L._SL75_.jpg|2274802], which was a steampunky, crazy romp that involved dead poets and milk-drinking giants. The Domino Men is a completely different style; it's an urban fantasy set in present-day London, and while it still has wacky elements and ties to The Somnambulist, it's far more restrained. The main character, Henry Lamb, is a filing clerk, which is a long ways from the conjurer and his bizarre sidekick of the first book.

I didn't like Henry all that much, he's far too passive. When it comes to storytelling, I prefer a narrator who makes things happen (or at least shows some independent thinking) over one who reacts to everything around him. And I missed the steampunk - to be fair, I don't expect every author to stay in the genre he or she started in, but I felt like Barnes really got the steampunk atmosphere down quite well before and was looking forward to more.

The Domino Men stands on its own, but I do wish I had read the two books closer together. Hawker and Boon were completely unforgettable, so I had no troubles there, but the role the Directorate played in The Somnambulist is really, really fuzzy in my head. I kept wanting to draw connections between the shadowy group in both novels, to see if what we learned about them now explained their actions then, but all I could really remember was that they existed.