The Domino Men is, loosely speaking, the sequel to Jonathan Barnes’ debut The Somnambulist – and it marks the definite development of his talent. While I enjoyed the first book, I sometimes found the tone an uneasy compromise between Robert Rankin-esque whimsy and grimy Victorian melodrama, and perhaps I expected more laughs than I got. By bringing the second volume in to the present day, he has retained the dark humour and the trappings of the occult, while having characters and situations that seem much more suited to his style.

It all starts with Henry Lamb, a Civil Service filing clerk who lives a humdrum existence, perhaps a reaction to the fact he was once a child TV star in a crappy sitcom. Normality is cycling to work, eating a solitary lunch on the embankment and lusting after his landlady, but it’s not to last – after Henry’s grandfather has a stroke, things start to get seriously weird seriously quickly. The Directorate, that shadowy organisation that Edward Moon worked for in the first book, are still around (and still run by the same man), and they need to recruit Henry. Gone are the comedy public-school Chinamen of the first book, to be replaced by rather more three-dimensional, and in many cases deeply peculiar, operatives. From their cunningly disguised HQ in a pod on the London Eye, the Directorate is engaged in an age-old struggle with an implacable foe – the British Royal Family!

After a while, the foe injects itself in to Henry’s narrative – it tells us he’s a liar and a fantasist, and then gives us an account of the Prince of Wales, Arthur Windsor (a thinly veiled cariacture of our own Prince Charles) and his gradual induction in to the deep dark secrets of the House of Windsor. The account of the Prince’s descent in to madness and addiction, and his redemption as part of the unfolding plot, is woven in with Henry’s story for the rest of the book.

Henry, meanwhile, is caught up in an increasingly bizarre series of quests that eventually mean he has to confront the Domino Men, Hawker and Boon, otherwise known as the Prefects. These two overgrown schoolboys, apparently immortal, undoubtedly sociopathic, were first enountered in The Somnambulist and when Henry meets them they are imprisoned in a chalk circle in the bowels of Number Ten, Downing Street. Their relentless, dated schoolboy banter (“What a tip-top stinker”) is in stark contrast to their amazing capacity for violence, but like it or not they are intriniscally a part of the battle to come between the Directorate and the House of Windsor, although the only side they are really on is their own.

The revelations and twists come fast and furious, and manage to keep us on our toes right up to a suitably outlandish conclusion. With a plot than has more than a few echoes of a modern Doctor Who episode, Barnes draws us in to a universe where normality soon ceases to have much meaning, although through it all Henry is doing his best to keep his feet on the ground and his amorous attentions on his landlady. Taking an everyman character and throwing him in to bizarre and unpleasant situations is hardly a new thing to do in the world of fantasy, but Barnes does it with relish and applomb, reminiscent of such excellent books as Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere and even Douglas Adams, whose Arthur Dent may set the gold standard for the bewildered and reluctant hero.

The Domino Men is a very enjoyable romp indeed, and as the Prefects might say, tippety top.

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