The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
I came to read The Meaning of Night via the recommendation of a friend, someone I respect but would not have guessed liked this sort of thing. Which just goes to show you how shallow I am. The guy’s a Harvard MBA, and yet I would not have picked a modern novel set in and written in the style of mid-nineteenth century England. And on that same tack, I would not have otherwise chosen this book to read on my own. That I earned a degree in English only goes to show you nothing can be taken for granted; I just don’t much care for books of that era. They’re readable, in their way, but usually drawn out and dull. If there’s going to be several chapters in a row of people sitting in gardens worrying about how someone’s whispering will sully their name, I need the prose style to be a little bit better than readable. At least chuck in a murder or something.
Which is where Michael Cox is an improvement, in my opinion, on the books he’s emulating. He starts us off, first sentence, with a murder, and then spends the rest of the book justifying the murder. And it’s not what you think. I used the word “justify,” but truth be told, there’s no justice in it, and the narrator is well aware of this. As anguish goes, this murder’s got more for a reader to sink his or her teeth into than the anguish of wondering if Miss so-and-so is going to marry beneath her station
Folks who like bibliographical novels (I abuse the term) such as Shadow of the Wind and Ex Libris will enjoy a tale steeped in book love– and I do mean “book,” not just stories and literature, but paper and cardboard and leather. I tend to read into things too much, and I couldn’t help identifying with the narrator, the murder he commits, in that I read this book on an e-reader and so confounded pretty much everything the narrator held dear. Which is as much a note to myself as it is fit for this review, so forgive me this additional digression.
I mentioned “readable” prose stlyes, and Cox’s writing is exactly that. Nothing too scintillating or evocative here. I don’t know if he could have written this otherwise, however, in as much as the book is very immersive, and dazzling the reader with a brilliant prose style might have been a little too removed from the heart of the text. So it sounds like I am making excuses, but I’d like to give credit to author for sticking true to the voice of the middle nineteenth century.
There were bits of the novel I could do without, and I’m sort of ambivalent towards any explanation that these, too, were true to late Victorian novels. Dream sequences, opium-induced and otherwise, which are always so tiresome, in my opinion. Can’t stand them, really, but at least they were few and far between, and not overlong. Maybe Cox hid some symbols in there, but at least he didn’t hinge the plot on them, some sort of “aha!” moment that helps solve the mystery.
Because this does read, in parts, like a mystery novel, with the narrator chasing down clues, conducting interviews, and finding secrets hidden in the tombs. This is also, as I said, one of those “great expectations” type novels, borrowing the phrase from Dickens to name stories about humble, hard-working young men brought into a higher station in life to see what they can accomplish. It’s also partly a romance, which I could have otherwise done without, except this time the romance does hinge the plot, so I muddled through.
And it’s also, as befits the murder at the beginning, a revenge novel, and while I don’t want to give anything away, I can at least tell you I was glancing down at the page numbers every once in a while, knowing the narrator needed to get on with it, wondering when he would, and then, desperately, wondering if he would. He was a bit of a Hamlet in that sense, and, again, don’t know if Cox meant it to be so, but I was on pins and needles through certain passages.
My understanding is that Cox took a long time to compile notes and outlines for The Meaning of Night, and only under the influence of disease-fighting drugs did he get a sudden burst of energy and finish the darn thing off. There are some parts where intrigue is high, only to have it all explained away at the end, which makes me wonder how much if this was “invented” as he wrote and how much was planned. But I’m going to give Cox the benefit of the doubt again, and let it be explained that he was emulating the serial novels of the time, drawing things out as much as he could and then stitching them up at the end to the best of his abilities. After all, who reads a novel just for the plot?
Then again, when the first sentence describes a murder, sometimes, that’s plot is the only reason to read it. And so, finally, this is why I’m rounding the 3.5 stars down to 3. But really, this is a 7 out of 10.