Speculative Fiction Junkie

Jebediah Berry

I first learned about Jebediah Berry's debut novel, The Manual of Detection, from this post on Jeff VanderMeer's website. After learning a little more about it, I became convinced that it might be the follow up to Jack O'Connell's The Resurrectionist that I've been craving lately. Having just finished it, I can say that this is partially true and that I'm both impressed and disappointed with this book.

Like The Resurrectionist, the The Manual of Detection is difficult to describe. To call it a noir mystery would be accurate but insufficient because above all, it's a work of surreal fiction.

Set in a time period reminiscent of something you would find in an early twentieth century hardboiled detective novel, the book tells the story of Unwin, an experienced clerk at the Agency who is unexpectedly--and mistakenly, he believes--promoted to detective. He soon learns that the detective for whom he clerks has gone missing and begins to revisit his cases in an attempt to discover any clues that might help him figure out what happened.

One of the best things about The Manual of Detection is the elaborate setting Mr. Berry has created. The city is richly imagined and full of oddities such as a museum with exhibits like the World's Oldest Murdered Man, an undertaker next to a graveyard with a seedy bar in his basement, secret trains, a traveling carnival that no longer travels, and more. The time period in which the book ostensibly takes place and the fact that it's always raining also lend the place a distinct feel. The Agency, too, is a fascinating place. While it has an Orwellian surveillance aspect to it, it's chief characteristic is its organization. Everything is rigidly hierarchical: underclerks archive information, clerks work for a specific detective, detectives are overseen by 'watchers,' messages are only transported via special messengers, etc., and it is highly irregular for anyone to act inconsistently with his or her role.

The surreal scenes that Mr. Berry conjures up are another strength of this book. Some of these are as weird as anything you'd find in O'Connell or Miéville and are just as compelling. There are weird meetings at night that reminded me of Eyes Wide Shut (minus the copulation), weird subterranean rooms in which isolated individuals toil far beneath the Agency, cases of thrice murdered men, and this barely scrapes the surface of how weird this book gets.

While I enjoyed The Manual of Detection a lot, it suffers from two problems in my opinion. First, the weirdness is poured on so heavily that it's disorienting, which is fine by itself, but which in this case made it more difficult to care about the characters and the story. I love books in the new weird subgenre as well as mysteries containing magic realism in the vein of Jack O'Connell, so I wouldn't say such a thing lightly. But without a sufficient grounding in something familiar the artistically weird just becomes the inscrutably weird.

The second problem was that when the ultimate mystery is revealed, it was underwhelming. I don't really know how else to say it. I don't want to give too much away so I'll just say this: a lot of what happens in the book works through dreams, and that just didn't live up to the size and quality of the world that Berry built. It sort of felt like an unbalanced equation. And while the rigidity of the Agency was meant to contrast with the craziness of the rest of the city, this dynamic just wasn't that interesting either.

Mr. Berry is an excellent writer with a wonderful imagination, and I really hope he continues to write books like The Manual of Detection, just not exactly like it.

Rating: 7/10

The True First

The Manual of Detection was first published by The Penguin Press in February of 2009.

[This review was not based on a review copy]