By Jonathan Barnes
The Domino Men is the story of Henry Lamb, one-time child star of a cancelled sit-com whose catchphrase haunts him to this day and who is now working as a filing clerk at the Civil Service Archive Unit – Storage And Record Retrieval. Henry seems destined to plod through life until his Grandfather has a stroke and the subsequent trail of events opens his eyes to a whole other world where a secret war is being waged, between ‘The Directorate’ (whose HQ is on the London Eye) and the Royal family, for control of the capital. Henry finds himself ‘promoted’ at work and thus subsumed into The Directorate in his Grandfather’s stead to help stop the Windsor’s in their tracks, but unlike his Grandfather, Henry is clueless, hapless and hopelessly out of his depth and that’s without the attentions of the titular Domino Men, a kind of demonic Tweedle-Dum and Tweedle-Dee who seem to be following Henry’s progress (or lack of it) with far too much interest.
There is something very ‘British’ about The Domino Men. It’s not a single element that you can point to, rather it’s a combination of things. The most obvious is the humour, it smacks of Pratchett and Rankin with a helping of Python and Hitchhiker’s, and it relentlessly pokes fun at class structure and civil service hierarchy and it does so with that delightfully absurdist twist that only English writers do this well.
But despite the great humour it’s an uneven book, which is not to say it’s bad, it isn’t, it’s great fun and makes for compelling reading but while The Somnambulist, Barnes first novel, is set in the atmospheric pea-souper’s of early 20th Century London this is very much a contemporary London which immediately puts it at a disadvantage. While the first novel was peppered with rich characters and assorted circus freaks, The Domino Men’s most intriguing couple are Hawker and Boon (they of the title), dressed in public school uniform with banter to match and a nice line in unstoppable mayhem and grisly murder. These two first appeared in his last book and hopefully will be in the next as they are, bar far, the best thing in it and not around nearly enough to justify top billing.
That said, while it lacks some of the magic of its predecessor it is a solid, slightly satirical, fun fantasy, well written, with a decent pace that you won’t regret spending the time with and I await more from Jonathan Barnes with eager anticipation.
The Domino Men is published by Gollancz and is available from Play.com, Blackwell and all good book stores.