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"After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper."
This chilling sentence begins the extraordinary tale of a man's quest to assume what he believes is his rightful place among the rich and titled of fog-shrouded Victorian England.
The Meaning of Night introduces Edward Glyver in the autumn of 1854 as he stalks and slays a stranger in a macabre rehearsal of a planned murder that's nearer and dearer to his heart.
British author Michael Cox, best known as the biographer of ghost-story writer M.R. James and editor of Oxford anthologies of ghost, detective and spy stories, has crafted a fictional epic that's reminiscent of Charles Dickens in sentiment and scope.
There also are echoes of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca and Henry James' The Turn of the Screw in the unreliability of the narrator, as it is not at all clear -- and at times seems distinctly unlikely -- that our hero has all his marbles.
And what a hero Glyver is, brilliant, crafty and likable despite his capacity for heinous acts. Glyver was raised by a single mother, and his earliest years are happy. Under the guidance of a beloved teacher, he develops a passion for books and scholarship. An anonymous benefactress pays for him to attend Eton, and it is there that he meets and first falls victim to his lifelong nemesis, the boy who would become the poet/criminal Phoebus Daunt.
The title comes from a Daunt poem: For Death is the meaning of night; The eternal shadow into which all lives must fall, All hopes expire. As events unfold, it seems Daunt grasps at everything Glyver sees as his by right, including a place in the family of the 25th Baron Tansor, the master of an idyllic country estate, and the love of the baron's beautiful cousin.
Although a weighty 700 pages, the story is unfailingly suspenseful. It begins with the pretext that a modern-day Cambridge University "professor of post-authentic Victorian fiction" has found, in an anonymous bequest, the shocking confession of a man whose very existence cannot be confirmed.
As Glyver sinks into obsession, and perhaps madness, relating his journey among the denizens of London's upper and lower crusts, Cox provides a wealth of historical footnotes, ostensibly from the professor, to explain the people and places that cross Glyver's path.
Cox describes his first novel as a work that has been in progress for 30 years. Given the appetite for fiction set in the 19th century -- as evidenced by the enduring popularity of classic authors of the time and the success of contemporary works, notably Michel Faber's 2002 The Crimson Petal and the White -- Cox deserves to find his labor of love requited.
The Meaning of Night:
A Confession
By Michael Cox
W.W. Norton, 703 pp., $25.95
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