What Book to Read?

If you like the stories of Wilkie Collins, why not try another Victorian ‘sensation’ novel, this time by Michael Cox. His book ,The Meaning of Night, shares with Collins the melodrama, the mood, the themes and the measured language of a Victorian novel – only Cox’s book was first published in 2005.

Michael Cox had always wanted to write a Victorian style ‘sensation’ novel. Over thirty years, he made a number of starts, but it was only when he became seriously ill with cancer that he managed to do it. He threw out what he had already written, but found a way to connect as a narrative all the ideas he had been thinking about for so long. He completed the book 2005. It was immediately popular.

Cox adopted a number of Victorian techniques and conventions in this huge and sprawling novel. It is presented as a text discovered by a modern scholar of Victorian literature – such pretence being itself a Victorian device. There are a number of footnotes referencing places and events of the time, which is around the 1850s. There are standard Victorian themes such as revenge and obsession and the role of fate. It is written in a consciously Victorian style, with long descriptive sentences. The grammar, syntax and word choice are all what you would find in Dickens or Collins, as in the following, where Glyver first becomes aware of the puzzle he has to unravel:

Gradually, a story began to emerge from the shadows; or, rather, the fragmentary and incomplete elements of a story. As if extracting broken shards for the imprisoning earth, I painstakingly gathered the fragments together, and laid them out, piece by piece, seeking the linking pattern, the design that would bring the whole into view.

There are also wonderful evocations of dirty, smelly, fog-ridden London, as well as the magical picture of the great house, Evenwood, a house full of secrets.

The story, which is subtitled ‘A Confession’, is written from the point of view of Edward Glyver. He tells the ‘unknown reader’ the story of his life, the wrong done to him and his connection with the Duport family of Evenwood, starting from a point of crisis and then explaining how he arrived at this extreme. The opening sentence has rightly become quite famous: ‘After killing the red haired man I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.’ But this murder is only a trial run for the deed Glyver feels he is fated to undertake, and after he brings the reader up to date on the reasons behind this act, he then tells how he attempts to fulfil what he sees as the destiny imposed on him. Although Glyver has been wronged, his actions are indefensible, yet he remains a sympathetic character – which is a considerable achievement on the author’s part. I won’t tell you what happens, only noting that the outcome is more morally ambiguous than that found in most genuinely Victorian novels.

Cox published a sequel to The Meaning of Night, called The Glass of Time, in 2008. He had hoped to write a third in the series, bringing the story of Evenwood into the twentieth century, but died in 2009 before he could achieve this. This is a great pity, as these are two of the most engaging historical novels I have read recently. Purists will rightly say they are pastiche, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable.

The book has an interesting website: There is even a map of Evenwood.