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The Meaning of Night. A Confession |  |
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The Meaning of Night. A Confession | |
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. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
