There's a fascinating new book out there, published just last year, called The Somnambulist, by Jonathan Barnes. Due to my perception of certain limitations in the critical reviews which sometimes appear a bit narrow, I would like to offer my views on this book, as follows.
I found The Somnambulist gripping and absorbing, a real page-turner.. yet I haven't come to terms with what could be perceived as serious flaws but yet may not be because of the type of unreliable narrator he uses, along with making Samuel Taylor Coleridge an important figure in the book. Coleridge, besides being a poet and one of the proponents of the utopian pantisocracy, was also the father of modern literary criticism. He proposed that the reader of fiction has to assume a "willing suspension of disbelief" and I think that idea is crucial to the way this novel works.
Some critics had problems with the second half of the novel, and I think many of those problems can be resolved by considering the type of unreliable narrator employed along with what happens to the suspension of disbelief when the reader sees what that narrator's point of view really is. It can be difficult to make that shift because of the way the narrator pulls the reader in towards such sympathy and engrossment with other important characters, so that the realization of the importance of the narrator as a character might be difficult to realize or else achieved in a such a slow and subtle way that the reader might not get that the narrator is a character whose importance subsumes that of the other characters.
Thus the reader might well be inclined to want to criticize the author for the narrator's flaws when those flaws are part of the narrator's character and could be well justified. Still, one does wonder whether the author could be gratuitously -using- the narrator for sensationalist and lurid developments that sometimes seem self-serving on the author's part.. and do strain the limits of both belief and disbelief. However, this possibility does not warrant too much negative criticism because .. to repeat.. it is still part of the narrator's mental construct and not the author's.
For the first half of the novel, I believe that we are meant to think that we are getting a Victorian era murder-mystery-detective story with an emphasis on the strange and the bizarre, along with the great and wonderful ambience and worldview of that time. However, once the narrator inserts himself as a character in the story, that whole premise changes and gradually the foundations of both belief and disbelief get turned on their heads. In other words, if the narration is coming from a person who has gone through certain types of changes as the novel graphically suggests, then it's possible that the narration itself reflects that and the flaws are the narrator's and not the author's. Thus, I'm coming to think that this book is far better than it might appear contingent on the reader's change of mind along with the shift in the novel as the narrator assumes more personal prominence.
Also, I really appreciate this book for its unusual derivations taken from various works, including those of Coleridge, Mary Shelley, Galileo, Dickens, and Conan Doyle, among others. I'm not sure what to make of the more supernatural and sci-fi aspects, except that they are very fascinating and compellingly realized, and in quite a lurid, pulp-fiction manner sometimes. There is also quite a bit of bizarre and grotesque sensationalism in both action and characters, and I think the narrator's evolution into telling his own self-serving story adequately explains the parts that push the reader past an ability to suspend disbelief. That could perhaps be part of the reason why this novel is such a great page-turner.