A soul and its alarms

I've been trying to explain to people why I loved The Manual of Detection by Jedediah Berry, the 2009 novel in which a reluctant detective armed only with a book, a bicycle, an umbrella, and an alarm clock rescues civilization from a nefarious plot to steal all the alarm clocks in a city.

See? You're already dozing off.

Trust me: it's a terrific book, capable of capturing my entire attention through two long, uncomfortable flights in crowded airplanes last weekend. It's a detective novel and a meta-detective novel at the same time, set in a Kafkaesque but thoroughly recognizable world set at a slight tilt from the real. The hero, Charles Unwin, wants only to be allowed to continue doing his job unnoticed, a difficult task for a man whose shoes always squeak:

At home he went about in his socks. That way he could avoid disturbing the neighbors and also indulge in the occasional shoeless swoop across the room, as when one is preparing a breakfast of oatmeal and the oatmeal wants raisins and brown sugar, which are in the cupboard at the other end of the room. To glide with sock-swaddled feet over a world of glossy planes: that would be a wondrous thing! But Unwin's apartment was smallish at best, and the world is unkind to the shoeless and frolicsome.

The stolid Unwin, squeakily shod, moves through the city slowly, deliberately, patiently piecing together the pieces of a puzzle involving criminal carnival workers, a sleep-walking janitor, an assistant who always carries her lunchbox, and a mountain of stolen alarm clocks:

Somewhere amid the hills of clocks, a bell began to ring, a futile attempt to wake some sleeper a mile or more away. To Unwin the sound was a hook to his heart: the world goes to shambles in the murky corners of the night, and we trust a little bell to set it right again. A spring is released, a gear is spun, a clapper is set fluttering, and here is the cup of water you keep at your bedside, here the shoes you will wear to work today. But if a soul and its alarms are parted, one from the other? If the body is left alone to its somnolent watches? When it rises--if it rises--it may not recognize itself, nor any of brief day's trappings.

In the course of the novel, Unwin comes to recognize himself as more than a mindless functionary serving a mysterious faceless Agency. I closed the book with the sound of alarm clocks ringing in my ears and immediately wanted more--but alas, Jedediah Berry has not yet published another book. When he does, I'll be waiting, hoping for another book like The Manual of Detection that can provide a wonderful wake-up call.