Product Description

A cold October night, 1854. In a dark passageway, an innocent man is stabbed to death.

So begins the extraordinary story of Edward Glyver, book lover, scholar and murderer. As a young boy, Glyver always believed he was destined for greatness. This seems the stuff of dreams, until a chance discovery convinces Glyver that he was right: greatness does await him, along with immense wealth and influence. And he will stop at nothing to win back a prize that he now knows is rightfully his.

Glyver's path leads him from the depths of Victorian London, with its foggy streets, brothels and opium dens, to Evenwood, one of England's most enchanting country houses. His is a story of betrayal and treachery, of death and delusion, of ruthless obsession and ambition. And at every turn, driving Glyver irresistibly onwards, is his deadly rival: the poet-criminal Phoebus Rainsford Daunt.

Thirty years in the writing, The Meaning of Night is a stunning achievement. Full of drama and passion, it is an enthralling novel that will captivate readers right up to its final thrilling revelation. (20060512)

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Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #257498 in Books
• Published on: 2006-09-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 608 pages

Amazon.co.uk

Early Buzz From Amazon.co.uk Top Reviewers

We queried our top 100 reviewers and asked them to read The Meaning of Night and share their thoughts. We've included these early reviews below in the order they were received. For the sake of space, we've only included a brief excerpt of each reviewer's response, but each review is available for reading in its entirety by clicking the "Read the review" link. Enjoy!
John Chippindale: "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper . . ."
If the opening sentence of this book does not demand the attention of the reader, I don’t know what will. If you never pick up another book, you must read this one." Read John Chippindale’s review

Budge Burgess: "With 600 pages of narrative, Latin chapter headings, literary and scholarly allusions, compendious footnotes, and the conceit that this is, indeed, a Victorian testament bequeathed to posterity by its hero and consequently written in an approximation of mid-19th century style, this is a weighty tome, and one which suffers from its art." Read Budge Burgess’s review

David Bryson: " 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." Read David Bryson’s review

Kona: "This is an exciting read, full of period details and charm. Highly recommended for fans of historical fiction." Read Kona’s review

Russell Clarke: "Goes against the flow of the usual revenge motif in culture and art and is all the more poignant and compulsive for it. A highly recommended read." Read Russell Clarke’s review

Andrew Butterfield: "I’m not usually a fan of this genre, and didn’t expect too much of The Meaning of Night, but I must confess I was drawn into the story and helped along by the easy yet literary writing style."Read Andrew Butterfield's review

N. C. Samaniego: "The story itself is ingenious, building hopes of a satisfactory outcome, and the unexpected final twist prepares for a dramatic showdown." Read N. C. Samaniego’s review

Bruce Loveitt: "If you love the 19th century....the times and the literature of the period....you will love this book. It is both exciting and touching, appealing to both the intellect and the heart. A winner." Read Bruce Loveitt’s review

Peter Kenney: "The story is marked by clever twists and the writing is excellent. I recommend this book without reservation to any reader who likes a fascinating tale packed with intrigue, romance and robust characters." Read Peter Kenney’s review

Samantha Banwell: "Although not a fan of this book, I cannot help but admire its descriptive detail of Victorian England." Read Samantha Banwell’s review

M. J Leonard: "Meticulously researched, forbiddingly atmospheric and also remarkably secretive, Cox writes with a sharp eye for period detail. The novel is a strange and heady brew of social convention, the desolation of a lonely, half-mad man and the restrictions of a society who continually refuses to acknowledge him.!" Read M.J. Leonard’s review

Amanda Richards: "This is a big book, a huge book, a massive tome – it is one of those books that would cause grievous bodily harm if dropped upon the unsuspecting foot. But don’t let that deter you – from the first confession to the final gripping chapter you’ll find yourself a tad reluctant to place your bookmark between the pages, even when the midnight hour has ticked away and a new work day is approaching in mere hours." Read Amanda Richard’s review

Anders P. Jensen: "The occationally odd names of people and places may seem a bit too cute at first (Phoebus Rainsford Daunt?!), and I haven't read all of the ‘editor's notes’, but Cox is easily forgiven, because he can write." Read Anders P. Jensen’s review

A. Skudder: "Nearly everything I would like to say about this book would involve giving away something, and a great deal of the enjoyment of the story is in experiencing the sudden changes of direction without warning, right the way up to the very brave ending. If you want to know what that ending is and why it is so brave you will have to read it yourself, but you are unlikely to regret it." Read A. Skudder’s review

Daniel Jolley: "If you harbor the slightest appreciation for the unparalleled power and beauty of the written word, you will want to immerse yourself in the pages of The Meaning of Night." Read Daniel Jolley's review

Themis-Athena: "It reportedly took a tragedy in Michael Cox's life to transform an unfinished manuscript begun thirty years earlier into a novel finally and deservedly now making its way into print. I very much hope it won't take another tragedy (or another thirty years) for his next book to be published." Read Themis-Athena’s review

The Fragrant Wookiee: "An intriguing novel which will completely immerse you in its twisting subtleties and which you will be very glad you decided to give a try. I know I was.." Read the Fragrant Wookiee’s review

Publishing News
‘Murray will present its biggest marketing and publicity campaign for what it calls "the most extraordinary novel of 2006"’

Review
‘It has been hard to ignore the proliferation of pseudo-Victorian novels following the success of Sarah Waters. Many have been of indifferent quality, but Michael Cox’s debut is an excellent addition to the genre. It is a tale of obsession, love and revenge, played out amid London’s swirling smog ... Glyver is an outstanding creation ... Cox lovingly recreates the atmosphere of the period, from grand dinner parties to assignation with ladies of the night ... Yet he never allows period detail to swamp the human drama at the novel’s heart’

 

(Daily Mail 20060722)

‘Murray will present its biggest marketing and publicity campaign for what it calls “the most extraordinary novel of 2006”’

(Publishing News 20060722)

‘The novel has many attractions including its nicely twisted narrator and some of that gothic mystery appeal that helped to make The Shadow of the Wind such a hit.’

(The Bookseller, Benedicte Page, Ones to watch 20060722)

‘An absolute treat from start to finish.’

(The Bookseller: Rodney Troubridge 20060722)

‘Cox evokes the Victorian era effortlessly.’

(The Bookseller: Liz Taylor 20060722)

‘Spellbinding Victorian mystery . . .Dark atmospheric storytelling with wicked twists and turns’

(Good Housekeeping 20060722)

‘An enthralling journey into the depths of Victorian London and the psyche of a man obsessed, Michael Cox’s The Meaning of Night will have you hooked from [the] stunning opening line to the thrilling final revelation’

(InStyle 20060722)

'Cox creates a strong sense of place, a complex narrative full of unexpectedly wicked twists, and a well-drawn cast of supporting characters. His language is mesmerizing, and his themes of betrayal, revenge, social stratification, sexual repression, and moral hypocrisy echo those of the great 19th-century novelists. Written in the tradition of Michel Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White and Sarah Waters’s Fingersmith, Cox’s masterpiece is highly recommended for all fiction collections'

(Library Journal 20060722)

'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 l854 London...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'

(Publishers Weekly 20060722)

‘A remarkably entertaining treat which begs comparison with the world of Patricia Highsmith’

(Kirkus 20060722)

'The pages teem with wit and erudition and the plot thickens like a good minestrone soup . . . Thrilling'

(Courier Mail 20060722)

‘A handsome slice of Victoriana... a rewarding, sinister yarn wrapped around an austere meditation on fate, faith and privilege’

(Hephzibah Anderson, Observer 20060722)

‘Worth staying up all night for... a gripping adventure story about a man’s thirst for revenge... extraordinary because its literary influences are not only obvious, but integral. ... This is serious literary fan-fiction. Any adult who has secretly enjoyed Harry Potter will love this book’

(Melissa Katsoulis, The Times 20060722)

‘A novel of fate and free will, forensic detection and blind love, crime and its justifications. The atmosphere crackles, but beneath all is a sly sense of humour. The plotting is second to none – a finely tuned yet extravagantly complex piece of clockwork’

(Evening Standard 20060722)

‘Like Charles Palliser, Michel Faber and Sarah Waters, Cox is making the Victorian era a switchback ride for the reader’s mind... a rich and complicated tale ... a journey into darkness’

(Independent 20060722)

‘Impressively fluent first novel’

(Sunday Telegraph )

‘An unadulterated pleasure... In prose as flamboyant as a bespoke smoking jacket, Cox’s metropolis comes to life, teeming with hearty whores and weasily clerks... Cox skilfully brings a modern sensibility to his 19th-century opus...Cox’s epic is as thrilling as a Hansom cab chase and as guilty a pleasure as a nocturnal turn at a gentleman’s “introducing house”’

(Independent on Sunday )

‘Exhilarating descriptions of the seamier side of Victorian London... True culture really does nourish’

(Guardian )

‘Page-turning’

(GQ )

‘A gripping page-turner for a dark winter evening’

(Good Book Guide )

‘A luxurious and engaging autumn read’ (thelondonpaper )

‘Next year’s Booker Prize is no contest. If there is any justice the winner has just been published... It is beautifully written, brilliantly constructed and worth the $435,000 advance it commanded. Every penny’

(Writer’s Forum )

‘Without a doubt a stunning achievement...In writing The Meaning of Night, Michael Cox has ensured that his name will soon become as household as Oxo’

(shotsmag.co.uk )

‘Thank goodness the man has perseverance – not since Ian Pears and An Instance of the Fingerpost has historical-crime fiction been so well crafted, written and presented, with even the cover being worthy of mention'

(chrishigh.com )

‘Gripped from the start, you fly through the dazzling opening chapter, in thrall to the voice of Edward Glyver... Moral good expires on the rocks as the turning pages seem to accelerate. You are hooked’

(Scotland on Sunday )

‘Cox evocatively conjures the ‘Great Leviathan’ of Victorian London in nicely weighted prose ... a compelling story’

 

(Richard Godwin, Literary Review )

‘It has everything crucial to a literary thriller — a gripping plot, a ruthless, ambitious rags-to-riches character and a whole conjured world of its own’

 

(Lauren Hadden, Image (Ireland) )

‘Unusual and remarkable... Key to the convincing nature of this confession is Cox’s grasp of the minutiae of the times and the language of the period, so that the reader at times forgets this isn’t a contemporary of Dickens...’

 

(South China Sunday Morning Post )

‘A brooding, sinister work. Bedecked in all the literary adornments of the period, it seeps with questions about the nature of good and evil, fate, inheritance, love and, above all, faith’

 

(Fiona Atherton, Scotsman )

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Customer Reviews

Never has the Victorian period been so cunningly fashioned as in Michael's Cox's atmospheric The Meaning of Night
Never has the Victorian period been so cunningly fashioned as in Michael''s Cox''s atmospheric The Meaning of Night. The enigmatic Edward Glyver is on a mission: wracked with envy and jealousy and anger, he seeks to assassinate a Mr. Phoebus Daunt, a man from his youth, whom he blames for derailing his university career and cheating him out of the inheritance that he feels is by rights his.
It is only through the anonymous murder of a redheaded man on the dark and misty streets of London that Edward can sharpen his skills and hopefully come to terms with the fact that he can kill. The event, however, sets of a chain of events and as recollection and memory take control, Edward thrusts the reader back into his past, where we learn that this part-time scholar, but duplicitous and rather neurotic individual, truly felt that he was born for greatness.
Cox brings to life the well-appointed and prestigious country halls of Victorian England in all their self-congratulatory sumptuousness as he traces Edward''s journey from a naïve country boy to a disgraced and disgruntled student, to a duplicitous legal assistant and on to the ultimate fulfillment of his one aim - to pay Daunt back for usurping his privileged and once-fortunate path in life.
From the pampered halls of aristocracy to the bawdy and opium fuelled houses and crime-riddled back alleys where theft and deceit and even murder thrive, The Meaning of Night is a tour-de-force of fops and gentlemen, lords and ladies and women of the night as the author beautifully immerses the reader in the underclass of London''s villains, crooks and suppliers of pretension in every form.
The battle for Edward''s ascendancy over Phoebus is scornfully played out in a type of detailed confessional and also of a series of letters flying from the pen of various characters, including Edward''s natural and adopted mother. As the correspondence grows more agitated and as the plot thickens, we get much closer to learning the truth about Daunt''s true motivations for wrestling Edward''s life away from him.
Meticulously researched, forbiddingly atmospheric and also remarkably secretive, Cox writes with a sharp eye for period detail. The novel is a strange and heady brew of social convention, the desolation of a lonely, half-mad man and the restrictions of a society who continually refuses to acknowledge him. Throughout the course of the novel, Edward learns the hard lesson that murder is not necessarily the right medicine for thwarting the results of ruthless ambition and desire.

Terrific start but too contrived and over-inflated
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.

A weighty tome, and one which suffers from its art
With 600 pages of narrative, Latin chapter headings, literary and scholarly allusions, compendious footnotes, and the conceit that this is, indeed, a Victorian testament bequeathed to posterity by its hero and consequently written in an approximation of mid-19th century style, this is a weighty tome, and one which suffers from its art.
"The Meaning of Night" is undoubtedly well researched, and does achieve some conviction as an authentic revenant of 1850''s England. There are some slight parallels with "Bleak House" in its presentation of a struggle for succession to an inheritance; there are parallels with "David Copperfield" in its nature as an orphan''s autobiography, an orphan who will, indeed, be sorely abused by an old school friend. But when the novel opens, you hope for echoes of Dostoevsky.
The tale begins with a murder. Cold blooded. Rational - or, at any rate, rationalised. For this is a dummy run, a test before the real thing. An innocent victim slaughtered and dismissed while our hero proves to himself that he has the steely heart to go through with the real murder. Our hero has a fixed path, whether determined by him or by destiny: his objective is the execution of a man who has done him wrong, who has done him and the world many wrongs, a man who may warrant the noose. Fate has dealt our hero a cruel hand. The villain of the piece, we will learn, has abused him and misused him. But if the villain truly deserves elimination, can the slaughter of that first, innocent victim be justified?
The novel is presented as the autobiography of a man with no name, or rather of a man with several names. Such are the cruel blows dealt him he has been robbed of his true identity and has found refuge in a succession of guises. Yet, despite the intensity of the writing, he is a man who seems to remain anonymous to the reader. He never quite comes to life.
The narrative is clever. It strives to be clever. In an attempt to capture the verisimilitude of a Victorian hand and literary style, it becomes overburdened. It sacrifices pace and plot development for clever asides and extraneous detail. In places, it plods unbearably. We get discourses on books, we get footnotes, we get scenes dragged out unnecessarily. The writing style is self-reverential - the author seems to indulge in enjoyment of aping Victorian mannerisms. Plot, characterisation, and narrative get sacrificed in the process.
The plot gets complex, and it''s not always easy to remember what has gone before simply because the writing style is over-larded. You don''t anticipate the next bit of action, the next discovery; you plod on in the certain conviction that something will eventually come along, like the next station on a commuter line. It''s an interesting story, but it could use a more dynamic style. I was seriously bored in places and plodded on only because I''d undertaken to write this review.
The ending - abrupt, predictable, and not particularly satisfying. After 600 pages, as reader you should have formed a fairly intimate relationship with the hero, with the central character. I really hadn''t. If this book is intended for dramatisation on television or cinema screen (and the blurb at the back recites the names of popular 19th-century costume dramas), character and plot are going to have to be radically overhauled and the literary style left on the cutting room floor.
In sum, over-wordy, over-clever, and not over quickly enough. A more dynamic management of plot is required. A more dynamic writing style might have saved the plot. A more surgical exploration and dissection of the hero''s psyche and motivation might have given it greater literary weight. The opening line suggests that perhaps we''ll pursue a Dostoevsky-like enquiry into the mindset of a psychopathic killer and his explanation of murder, or maybe a sympathetic analysis of how a good man can be reduced to such amorality. But it doesn''t happen. Forty years after I read "Crime and Punishment", I can remember the hero''s name - an hour after I''ve finished "The Meaning of Night", I''ve forgotten all the names its central character uses.