The Meaning of Night [Audiobook] [Audio CD]

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 many 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.

I mostly enjoyed the 590 pages of this very long tome, which is a story of revenge and obsession set against a backdrop of late Victorian England. The story is of a Edward Glyver and his obsessive hatred for his rival Phoebus. Without giving away the story Edward believes that his enemy is responsbile for all the woes in this life, and, he spends most of it investigating, plotting against and shadowing his rival. In amongst that is a lost love, a lost innocence and many pages of description.

The writing style is a pastiche of a victorian novel with our author giving plenty of opportunity to describe the world of London in the 1800s as he imagined it to be. This was originally a positive point for me, but by about halfway it began to tire as I felt the author was being a little too clever, demonstrating on every other page his extensive knowledge of the 1800s with quotes and notations at the bottom of the text. This abundance of things to share does mean the novel is at least a hundred pages longer than it needs to be. I therefore found it very slow in the middle and nearly gave up, however, I was pleased I didn't as the ending held one's interest right to the end as the story began to overshadow its background.

So read this if you like historical fiction, if you like detail and description, if you like a book where the author likes to show off his knowledge and language this is for you.

Much of the press for this book emphasised the fact that it took Michael Cox 30 years to complete. At times, it felt that it was going to take me as long to finish reading it.

I know several people who loved the central device that used to keep the plot going - namely whereby Glyvert's narration takes you through certain events up to a particular point, before telling you that he'll tell you more about it later and returning to some part of the backstory that he can then use to lead you up to the next particular point. Personally, I've never been a fan of this device - whilst you can get away with using it a couple of times in a story, the constant use of it began to bore me and suggested that Cox didn't have any faith in the power of his story simply carrying the reader through on a more linear path.

Some of the backstory was interesting, but parts felt indulgent and tagged on - for example, whilst the scenes in Eton that first lead to the enmity between Glyver and Gaunt are important to setting up Glyver's motivation, they also fail to utterly convince in their own right - mainly because this is really the only time in the entire book that we get a sense of Gaunt as a character, and his portrayal as a vain, spiteful little schoolboy never leaves you, even when Cox would have you believe that he's rapidly becoming a criminal mastermind. More than that though, this narrative technique added surplus scenes that didn't really serve to do much other than see print added to more paper than was necessary - I honestly believe that this book could have been told equally well, if not more effectively, had Cox been persuaded to cut out at least 200 pages.

I also had severe issues with the style that Cox used to tell his story. The conceit of the book is that this is Glyver's handwritten confession, detailing everything that happened between him and Gaunt, which was discovered by some scholar who has edited some of the text to add footnotes explaining some of the 19th century references, thereby adding to its "authenticity". I can't even begin to tell you how irritating all the footnotes were. The transcriptions of the Latin chapter headings I could kind of understand, although they did give away what was going to happen. But the constant footnoting of shops and restaurants and items of clothes and so on and so forth just really got under my skin after a while.

There is definitely some sense in this book of Cox wanting to have his cake and eat it, both when it comes to the narration (he wants you to believe this is a genuine story, but doesn't trust you to tell it in a conventional way) and also when it comes to his characters and particularly Glyver. We're supposed to believe that Glyver is an intelligent man of the world, someone with certain underworld connections which help him to get defendants off in court but who is ultimately too trusting and too in love with a woman (Emily Carteret) whose betrayal costs him everything. It's something that doesn't stack up - not least because Carteret's character is so icy and two-dimensional that whilst Cox continues to tell you how vulnerable she seems, it's something that wholly lacks in credibility. The twist at the end of the book is no twist at all to anyone who has ever read a mystery novel (let alone a 19th century novel) but what infuriates is when Glyver is given huge hints that she may not be on the level and not only fails to take them, but also fails to make any kind of cursory investigation that would lead him to discover the truth. I was particularly disgusted when Cox has a scene where Glyver blithely gives Carteret the very means of proving his claim, despite 2 scenes with 2 different characters just a few pages before, each scene and each character warning him not to do just that. It's too contrived to be either entertaining or believable and if I hadn't already been lost at the halfway mark, I think that this would have been the breaking point.