For the past month or so I seem to have read nothing but ghost stories and tales of the supernatural - M. R. James, H. P. Lovecraft, Algernon Blackwood, Joe Hill’s dazzling 20th Century Ghosts and Susan Hill’s magnificently eerie The Man in the Picture. What struck me about them, even separated as they are by more than a century in time, is that they deal, almost exclusively, in loose ends, in things suggested but unspoken. In Blackwood’s The Man Who Found Out, for example, two scientists discover the truth about the universe, inscribed on tablets buried in the Assyrian sands. One is driven to death by the knowledge, the other almost into madness but Blackwood never reveals the exact nature of the revelation. How potent to hint at the horror; how vulgar and bathetic to actually tell us.
I’ve always loved stories like that, stories which require the reader to fill in a few of the gaps for themselves. In The Somnambulist, numerous characters who encounter the novel’s protagonist, Edward Moon, allude in hushed tones to something which happened in Clapham (an unprepossessing district of London), some disaster which has shattered his reputation. Although the consequences of Moon’s failure are never in any doubt, precisely what happened there is not made clear.
People who’ve read the book sometimes ask me if I know what it was. I reply that I have a pretty good idea before asking them what they think happened. The answer is often fascinating and usually not what I’d had in mind at all. Speculation can sometimes be so much more delicious than knowledge.
There are other gaps too, other invitations for imagination, although not to the point (I hope) that the narrative ever becomes unsatisfying. Mind you, a few of these loose ends will be tied up in the future.
What is the true purpose of the Directorate? What strange change do Hawker and Boon wreak upon Mr Dedlock? Who are the three mysterious men who appear in the Survivors Club, desperate to know if “the secret” is safe?
All of these questions and more will be answered next year in my second novel, The Domino Men. It takes place in the same world as the first book but firmly in the present day although, curiously, there are at least a few familiar characters who, against all known laws of physics and longevity, still seem to be loitering around the city.
But I’m afraid it still doesn’t tell you what happened in Clapham.
-- Jonathan Barnes
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