Product Description

"Superb.... An engrossing and complicated tale...that touches on every aspect of Victorian society."—Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper." So begins the "enthralling" (Booklist, starred review) and "ingenious" (Boston Globe) story of Edward Glyver, booklover, scholar, and murderer. A chance discovery convinces Glyver that greatness awaits him. His path to win back what is rightfully his leads him to Evenwood, one of England's most enchanting country houses, and a woman who will become his obsession. .

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #14978 in Books
• Published on: 2007-10-17
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 720 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780393330342
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
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From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Resonant with echoes of Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, Cox's richly imagined thriller features an unreliable narrator, Edward Glyver, who opens his chilling "confession" with a cold-blooded account of an anonymous murder that he commits one night on the streets of 1854 London. That killing is mere training for his planned assassination of Phoebus Daunt, an acquaintance Glyver blames for virtually every downturn in his life. Glyver feels Daunt's insidious influence in everything from his humiliating expulsion from school to his dismal career as a law firm factotum. The narrative ultimately centers on the monomaniacal Glyver's discovery of a usurped inheritance that should have been his birthright, the byzantine particulars of which are drawing him into a final, fatal confrontation with Daunt. Cox's tale abounds with startling surprises that are made credible by its scrupulously researched background and details of everyday Victorian life. Its exemplary blend of intrigue, history and romance mark a stand-out literary debut. Cox is also the author of M.R. James, a biography of the classic ghost-story writer.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post
Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night is the most recent example of what one might dub "Victorian noir." As in a 19th-century sensation novel -- think of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, John Meade Falkner's The Nebuly Coat or even Charles Dickens's Bleak House -- its intricate plot turns on the question of who should rightfully inherit a great estate and a sizable fortune. Oaths of secrecy, matters of identity, cold-hearted revenge, relentless subterfuge and mysteries of all kinds play their considerable parts. At one point, the narrator is frankly told that he should "trust no one." The reader, too, might bear this in mind.

The sensation novel, after all, deals in narrative traps for the unwary and diabolical plot twists and innocence besmirched and oily evil laughingly triumphant (at least for a while). But Cox further darkens his own superb pastiche by imbuing it with a modern noir sensibility when he makes the character of his hero as unsettling as that of his villains. From the first sentence we find ourselves lost in moral perplexity, our sympathies unanchored and adrift: "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper." The I here is Edward Glyver, the ostensible "hero" of the book, a gentleman of the most contradictory nature. On the one hand, he can discourse knowledgeably about rare editions and Old Master prints, work with a fine sensibility at his photographic studies, succor those less fortunate and comport himself with an almost chivalric courtesy. On the other, he allows an innocent man to step to the gallows, regularly resorts to opium or streetwalkers to relax his nerves and consciously betrays a woman who loves him. Worse yet, he murders a complete stranger. What kind of hero is this?

First of all, don't picture Glyver as one of those high-spirited Victorian bounders we secretly envy or even admire; he's no Flashman. Neither is he the kind of charmingly amoral aesthete or the "bold artist" that Thomas de Quincey depicts in his perverse essay "On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts." In fact, Glyver brutally stabs to death a total stranger for an utterly practical, existential reason: He needs to test whether he has the mettle to kill a man in cold blood.

Almost from the start, then, the reader realizes that The Meaning of Night is more than a plot-driven thriller; it's also a study of psychological obsession. Glyver views his life as fated, as inextricably entangled with that of his erstwhile friend and now mortal enemy, the poet and sycophantic humbug Phoebus Rainsford Daunt. But is Daunt truly the monster that Glyver believes him to be? Or is Glyver peering into a glass, darkly, and glimpsing a reflection of himself? There are times in The Meaning of Night when one recalls those famous studies of a divided self, Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," Poe's "William Wilson" and, most harrowing of all but least known, James Hogg's The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. As Glyver himself solemnly writes:

"The boundaries of this world are forever shifting -- from day to night, joy to sorrow, love to hate, and from life itself to death; and who can say at what moment we may suddenly cross over the border, from one state of existence to another, like heat applied to some flammable substance? I have been given my own ever-changing margins, across which I move, continually and hungrily, like a migrating animal. Now civilized, now untamed; now responsive to decency and human concern, now viciously attuned to the darkest of desires."

In fact, virtually all the principal characters in The Meaning of Night partake of this mixture of dark and light, good and evil; they disclose the truth only under duress, and all know more than they seem to. While Phoebus Daunt may be a scoundrel, he's also the acclaimed author of 13 volumes of verse, chiefly historical. Isabella Gallini may be an expensive courtesan, a poule de luxe, yet she's modest as well as beautiful, innately courteous, loving and, yes, hardworking. The unctuous, weaselly Fordyce Jukes, reminiscent of Dickens's Mr. Skimpole, carefully decorates his commonplace flat with exquisitely chosen objets d'art. The wholesome, very proper lawyer Mr. Tredgold privately collects books and prints of a "voluptuous" nature, such as that notorious Renaissance classic The Sixteen Postures. Although Miss Emily Carteret walks in beauty like the night, she actually wears glasses and is nearing the spinster age of 30. (What's more, she displays suspicious affection for her close female friend.)

In Cox's pages only the bit players are likely to be what they seem -- the faithful school friend, the sadistic thug, the kindly antiquarian cleric. Still, the pale, sad Miss Lamb who visits the narrator during his childhood actually turns out to be. . . . Well, best not to say.

But one can say that The Meaning of Night ranges from the Edenic country estate called Evenwood to the stews and alleys of London, from idyllic afternoons at Eton to alchemical studies at Heidelberg, from the sanctuary of a great private library to the midnight violation of a mausoleum. Throughout, Glyver shows, again and again, how Phoebus Daunt has repeatedly wrecked his life, his hopes and his happiness. The novel is a story of retribution, the dispossessed Glyver's revenge on his evil daemon.

The Meaning of Night revolves around a long-buried secret -- you knew that -- and builds to a shocking surprise. Each of these is well hidden or well set up, but the first will be guessed by any confirmed reader of Victorian fiction and the second foreseen by any aficionado of film noir. Of course, one can never be wholly sure -- a further unanticipated twist of the knife is always possible -- and so one happily turns the pages, caught up in the grip of the ever-tightening action while awaiting confirmation of initial suspicions. Yet even when all the truths are revealed, the climax reached, and the final postscripts pondered, some readers are likely to close this accomplished novel with a smidgen of dissatisfaction. On a technical level, Glyver's key intuition about the meaning of sursum corda -- lift up your heart -- seems a bit far-fetched, and even for a Victorian pastiche the book moves slowly. But these are quibbles compared to that one inescapable fact: Though the major characters either get what they want or what they deserve, you really don't like any of them very much.

Perhaps this shouldn't matter. Yet Dostoevsky's Raskolnikov ax-murders an old woman and Camus's Meursault shoots an innocent Arab, and we still care deeply for both as souls in torment, as human beings. But Cox makes Glyver in particular decidedly, distinctly unsympathetic. The Meaning of Night is certainly a more complex novel as a result, but also one without a clear ethical center. Discussions of religious belief recur periodically in these pages, and perhaps the characters reveal, in their different ways, an Arnoldian loss of faith. Without it, one is left drifting in that universe of moral relativity best evoked in the observation of Dickens's villainous Fagin: "Some conjurors say that number three is the magic number, and some say number seven. It's neither, my friend, neither. It's number one." In such a Darwinian world, the only safe haven lies in the arms of the beloved, and maybe not even there.

The Meaning of Night is Michael Cox's first novel, but he is well known as an authority on 19th-century popular fiction, the guiding force behind several Oxford anthologies of ghostly tales and detective stories, and the author of a biography of M.R. James (who gave us the eerie and chilling "Casting the Runes," "A Warning to the Curious" and "Count Magnus"). Cox knows his stuff -- and some of his characters and plot elements faintly recall the books he's learned from, such as Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas. The Meaning of Night even comes replete with footnotes, Latin chapter titles and quotations, as well as a sprinkling of contemporary argot and slang. The editor's pseudo-scholarly preface cautiously describes the manuscript as "one of the lost curiosities of nineteenth-century literature."

It is that and more. However you judge Edward Glyver himself, he certainly tells an engrossing and complicated tale of deception, heartlessness and wild justice, one that touches on nearly every aspect of Victorian society. At 700 pages, it should while away more than a few chilly autumn evenings.

Copyright 2006, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
*Starred Review* This enthralling historical novel--set in London in 1854, cast as a confession, and written in the dense and formal style of a Victorian novel--tells the unusual story of Edward Glyver, bibliophile, photographer, and murderer. Ostensibly the tale of a man whose rightful legacy has been deliberately withheld, it casts a much wider net, and at its center is its vivid portrait of a teeming London, "brilliant and beautifully vile." That dichotomy is also expressed in the deadly rivalry between scholarly Glyver and his archnemesis, Phoebus Daunt, who is esteemed as a poet but makes his living by bilking people of their money through elaborate con games while insidiously cultivating the affections of the heirless Lord Tansor. Raised in near-poverty, Glyver gradually becomes aware of the fact that he is Lord Tansor's son and begins a years-long search for evidence, but he is thwarted at every turn by the wily Daunt. An intriguing blend of book lover and man of the world, Glyver becomes completely obsessed with his quest, which takes him from exquisite libraries to smoky opium dens, dank bars, and gaudy brothels. His obsession also turns him from a discerning scholar into a cold-blooded murderer. Cox invokes emotions, from the iciest betrayal to all-consuming love, on a grand scale and gives them an equally impressive backdrop as he depicts a fetid London, its streets filthy but its people in thrall to the smallest details of social stratification. A masterful first novel and a must for readers of Iain Pears and David Liss. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

The victim of a conspiracy strikes back
The subtitle of "The Meaning of Night" is "A Confession". And the entire book is indeed a long, slow-moving confession, written in the first person by a 35-year-old man in 1854.

The book starts with a 2-page teaser in which the confessor describes how he killed a man, an unknown man he happened to encounter on the street. Why? Because the writer of this confession needed to ensure that he was indeed capable of killing before continuing with his plan of exacting revenge over "his enemy".

The confession then jumps back to the 1820's, with the writer slowly but surely describing the complicated set of circumstances, the conspiracies against him, that brought him to the killing of the random man in 1854. Then the story continues to its inevitable climax.

The early Victorian era in England provides the background for the story. Morals were different in this age, with the rich and powerful having a very different concept of what was right and wrong than the common people, or the people of Western society today for that matter. Even the "good" people in the story (there are a few) sometimes act in ways we find disappointing, even though they were acting morally by their standards.

This Victorian background and especially the different moral standards play an important role in the story, and one feels that the atmosphere described in the book is very authentic. It's just depressing that everyone seems to be a villain in one way or another, and conspiracies are rampant.

The writer of the confession and the complicated story with several conspiracies against him and his decision to wreak a terrible revenge on "his enemy" do not come across with such a high degree of believability. Especially the confessor's occasional expressions of remorse over the bad things he has done do not ring true. Or is this perhaps the author's intention? The confessor, in his desperate search for justice for himself, becomes just as evil and unjust as his despised enemy.

One interesting device used in "The Meaning of Night" is that it begins with an editor's foreword, and the book is full of footnotes and explanations penned by this editor. The fact that we know that this "editor" is fictitious does not reduce the effect. The reader will easily let him/herself be fooled into thinking that this must indeed be an authentic manuscript from 1854 because of the editor's many notes and footnotes.

This is a very well written book and very impressive, and I found it very enjoyable. My problem was finding it hard to identify with anyone in the story. The lack of morals or the difference in morals in the Victorian era were a barrier for me.

Rennie Petersen

NOX AND COX



The publishers seem to have high hopes for this debut novel. If so, I'm glad to endorse their opinion of it and I share their expectations.

The story is framed as the account by a murderer of his quest for vengeance on the man who cheated him of his hopes and his rightful heritage. It is set in Victorian England, partly in seedy London, partly in the rural grandeur that surrounds the most venerable English aristocracy. This is a promising formula -- Sherlock Holmes and Dr Jekyll have never lost their fascination. However it takes skill to recreate the atmosphere convincingly in the 21st century, and Michael Cox, biographer and editor of the great ghost-story writer M R James, seems to me never to hit a wrong note. The narrative is tense and eventful, but it's all slightly tongue-in-cheek too (as James himself was), and rightly so. The manuscript purports to have come to light in Cambridge University Library, and there is a preface by a personage entitled the Professor of Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction at that seat of learning, together with footnotes as the story goes along. The Professor hints darkly at 'conscienceless brutality and explicit sexuality', but don't get your hopes too high if that's your kind of thing - what the Professor says is not wrong, but what you will find is not exactly what his phraseology might lead one to expect either.

The style of writing is very sure-footed in not overdoing the pastiche-Victorian idiom. It is kept at a nicely-judged level of suggestiveness, but you would never take it for 19th century writing. One incidental benefit of this is that when letters are quoted and Cox goes in for a more explicit attempt at reproducing the Victorian manner of expression the contrast is all the more effective. The plot is very carefully worked out too (Cox seems to have taken 30 years over it). All the threads are picked up, sometimes in surprising ways, and all the hints and leads genuinely lead to something and are not wasted or forgotten. The story-line is complex up to a point, but there is no attempt at bamboozling the reader, and there is a pleasant clarity about the narration that kept me interested and expectant throughout the 600 pages of the work.

I found it all very involving I must say - I really cared about the outcome, and the detail is very convincing as well, particularly, for me, the excruciating interview between the narrator and Lord Tansor. As reading for entertainment it is a pretty superior effort. If it took 30 years I don't suppose we can expect a lot more from Michael Cox, but if I see anything else bearing his name on the cover I am going to be prompt in buying it.

PART ENGLISH HISTORY...PART ENGLISH MYSTERY...
This is a wonderful, highly stylized work of historical fiction. Those with a penchant for Victorian literature will appreciate this book, as it is written in the style of the period with a great deal of thought given to detail. The book begins as a presentation to the reader by a University of Cambridge Professor of a manuscript discovered in the Cambridge library among some papers. As such, the professor has added many footnotes that serve to illuminate some of the historical and literary allusions and references interspersed throughout the book. This was a literary contrivance that I very much enjoyed, both as a history buff and avid bibliophile. The overall concept is really that of a book within a book.

The manuscript purports to be a confession of sorts, as it tells a story of friendship, betrayal, and revenge, revealing a secret that had a profound impact on those whose lives it touched. After reading just the first sentence, I was hooked, as the story begins with a cold-blooded murder. Set in Victorian England, the story is told by an Edward Glyver, who is seeking to avenge himself on Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, a childhood friend whom he met while they were students at Eton. While at Eton, a wrong was done to Edward that would mark him forevermore.

The book offers a myriad of interesting characters and relationships that shaped Edward Glyver. The book is also rife with intrigues, coincidences, and secrets that deliciously unfold bit by bit, drawing the reader into the spider web of deceit that surrounds Edward Glyver, deceits that he is discovering and trying to unravel. The forces of good and evil are at work here, but who is good and who is evil is left for the discerning reader to determine, although such a determination is not always so black and white.

Peppered with memorable characters, as well as a gripping plot, this is a well-written book that will keep the reader riveted to its pages as the plot thickens. While some of the plot is predictable, despite its twists and turns, I still found myself barely able to put the book down, so I can do nothing less than to highly recommend this immensely readable book.