Product Description

“After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.”

So begins an extraordinary story of betrayal and treachery, of delusion and deceit narrated by Edward Glyver. Glyver may be a bibliophile, but he is no bookworm. Employed “in a private capacity” by one of Victorian London’s top lawyers, he knows his Macrobius from his First Folio, but he has the street-smarts and ruthlessness of a Philip Marlowe. And just as it is with many a contemporary detective, one can’t always be sure whether Glyver is acting on the side of right or wrong.

As the novel begins, Glyver silently stabs a stranger from behind, killing him apparently at random. But though he has committed a callous and brutal crime, Glyver soon reveals himself to be a sympathetic and seductively charming narrator. In fact, Edward Glyver keeps the reader spellbound for 600 riveting pages full of betrayal, twists, lies, and obsession.

Glyver has an unforgettable story to tell. Raised in straitened circumstances by his novelist mother, he attended Eton thanks to the munificence of a mysterious benefactor. After his mother’s death, Glyver is not sure what path to take in life. Should he explore the new art of photography, take a job at the British Museum, continue his travels in Europe with his friend Le Grice? But then, going through his mother’s papers, he discovers something that seems unbelievable: the woman who raised him was not his mother at all. He is actually the son of Lord Tansor, one of the richest and most powerful men in England.

Naturally, Glyver sets out to prove his case. But he lacks evidence, and while trying to find it under the alias “Edward Glapthorn,” he discovers that one person stands between him and his birthright: his old schoolmate and rival Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, a popular poet (and secret criminal) whom Lord Tansor has taken a decidedly paternal interest in after the death of his only son.

Glyver’s mission to regain his patrimony takes him from the heights of society to its lowest depths, from brothels and opium dens to Cambridge colleges and the idylls of Evenwood, the Tansor family’s ancestral home. Glyver is tough and resourceful, but Daunt always seems to be a step ahead, at least until Glyver meets the beguilingly beautiful Emily Carteret, daughter of Lord Tansor’s secretary.

But nothing is as it seems in this accomplished, suspenseful novel. Glyver’s employer Tredgold warns him to trust no one: Is his enigmatic neighbour Fordyce Jukes spying on him? Is the brutal murderer Josiah Pluckthorn on his trail? And is Glyver himself, driven half-mad by the desire for revenge, telling us the whole truth in his candid, but very artful, “confession”?

A global phenomenon, The Meaning of Night is an addictive, darkly funny, and completely captivating novel. Meticulously researched and utterly gripping, it draws its readers relentlessly forward until its compelling narrator’s final revelations.


From the Hardcover edition.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #21891 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-05
• Released on: 2007-06-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 608 pages

Books in Canada
Michael Cox took 30 years to write his first novel, a Victorian revenge story entitled The Meaning of Night. Thirty years! In an age of instant books, and instant culture, this is a shocking amount of time for anyone to spend on anything, let alone their first book. The results of Cox’s patience and care are obvious, though, and readers will be thankful for his painstaking efforts. The Meaning of Night is a gorgeously written and skillfully crafted literary thriller that transcends the bounds of genre and presents us with a beguiling portrait of one of the most intriguing characters in recent memory.
The book’s conceit is that it contains a ‘real’ confessional memoir written by an Englishman, Edward Glyver, in 1850. The confession is discovered much later in the Cambridge University Library, and then “transcribed from a holograph manuscript,” edited, and now presented to us with an introduction by J. J. Antrobus, a professor of “Post-Authentic Victorian Fiction.” We are promised by the Professor that the contents are “shocking” in their “conscienceless brutality and explicit sexuality,” and we are told that while many of the book’s characters and events are real, the name of the author/confessor could not be authenticated and is likely a pseudonym, as are the many other names Glyver employs in his memoir. This prologue is an intriguing little puff piece, though one wonders what effect such a preamble could have on a jaded modern reader who is likely to say, “Okay, your story’s ‘real’, just get on with it. Shock me.”
The first sentence of the actual confession, when it comes, isn’t particularly shocking, but it is one of the most bracing openers I have ever read: “After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn’s for an oyster supper.” That is, certainly, an example of the “conscienceless brutality” we were warned about. Immediately we sense that we’re in the presence of a Victorian equivalent of Bret Easton Ellis’s epicurean psychopath in American Psycho. This may be a Victorian tome, but it quickly becomes clear that this won’t be a Dickensian romp with an orphaned boy. No, this book has a distinctly darker feel, and that post-modern shiver comes on us more strongly as Glyver proceeds to describe in detail how he murdered the red-haired man.
The victim, it turns out, is merely a bit of target practice Glyver elects to give himself before going after his real enemy, one Phoebus Rainsford Daunt, a popular writer who, we are told, has offended and betrayed Glyver in some grievous fashion that warrants capital revenge. The red-haired man is a total stranger who just happened to catch Glyver’s eye. Glyver kills him in order to assure himself that he has the will to murder Daunt when he has the chance. The nature of Daunt’s betrayal is not yet clear.
The novel’s opening chapter is startling and gripping, and constitutes a clever bit of narrative structuring on Cox’s part. We are presented with a very unusual and troubling scene featuring a distinctly unsympathetic character committing an unpardonable crime-a crime that, as it turns out, is committed near the conclusion of Glyver’s story. The murder in the opening scene is followed by narrative shifts back in time as Glyver recounts his life story, and ultimately reveals why Daunt must die.
Here we encounter the much more familiar and predictable aspects of Victorian writing. Glyver grows up a relatively poor child with a brutal father and a mother who slaves away (at fiction writing, no less) to provide for her son. A mysterious benefactor turns up who provides the funds to send the promising young bibliographical scholar to Eton, where he first encounters Phoebus Daunt. And so we’re set on a path that twists and turns, involving buried secrets, the potential for the inheritance of a large fortune and a baronial peerage, and a love betrayed. In the midst of these stock elements, that opening crime is always present in our minds, shaping our impressions of everything we read. We’re left wondering what aspects of the conventional story to trust, coming as they do from a man who killed a red-haired stranger and then ate some shellfish, a man who can seem delusional, opium-addled, and paranoid on the one hand, and lucid, insightful, and even upright on the other.
What makes it all work is the character of Glyver, without doubt the great creative achievement of Cox’s novel. His is always an engaging voice that grows in complexity and outstrips the cold-blooded murderer we see in the opening chapter. Glyver offers himself and his world to us in vivid and dynamic Victorian prose infused with subtle wit and constant cynicism. Here is Glyver describing the city:

“London was cold and dismal-impenetrable, with choking fog for days on end, the streets slimy with mud and grease, the people as yellow and unwholesome-looking as the enveloping miasma.”

And here is his description of a funeral:

“It was a most melancholy spectacle: the ladies in their bombazine and crepe huddled together under umbrellas, the gentlemen, for the most part, standing unsheltered in the rain or beneath the yew-trees that grew about the church-yard, the black bands on their tall hats fluttering in the wind; the ranks of mutes and other mercenaries supplied by Mr. Gutteridge-some a little the worse for liquor-forlornly holding up their batons and soaking plumes; and the simple wooden coffin being borne towards the terrible gaping gash in the wet earth, preceded by the imposing figure of Dr. Daunt. Everything contributed to a bitter sense of the futility of the mortal condition. All was black, black, black, like the coal-angry sky above.”

The quality of the writing is consistent throughout the book as Glyver takes us from dingy opium dens in Bluegate-Fields to the windy desolation of coastal Northamptonshire to the fantastic baronial castle and grounds of Evenwood. Like the opium master he sometimes visits, Glyver is a potent weaver of dreams and perhaps that is one reason the reader is sometimes charmed into forgetting the murder we know he has committed.
Unlike more pedestrian historical fictions, Cox’s creation surpasses literary nostalgia-although it is still that. Any reader who longs to be immersed in the sheer oceanic glory of the English language as it was, before it dried up into its current puddle of soundbites and text messaging, will fall in love with this book if only for its august vocabulary. Viewed as a work of historical fiction or as a literary thriller, it is a superbly executed exemplar of both genres.
Never once does the reader feel the sheer weight of research that Cox must have undertaken over the 30 years it took him to write The Meaning of Night. When Glyver gets into the legal aspects of baronial peerage, we are given only what is necessary to understand his particular quandary, whereas a lesser author might have whacked us over the head with all he or she had learned about the subject. The result is a convincing and exquisite dream of a book, with a character who transcends his Victorian era and takes his place as a fresh creation-a fully realized individual who is disturbing but also endlessly fascinating. By the end of the book, we’ve forgotten J. J. Antrobus and his distracting little footnotes throughout the text. The meaning of The Meaning of Night is not found in the gimmicky bits but in the intoxicating complexity of its beguiling central character, whose true name we never know, and who is left to deliver the book’s final haunting words, thankfully without explanatory comment.
Tim McGrenere (Books in Canada)

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. 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 1854 London. That killing is mere training for his planned assassination of Phoebus Daunt, an acquaintance Glyver blames for virtually every downturn in his life. Glyver feels Daunt's insidious influence in everything from his humiliating expulsion from school to his dismal career as a law firm factotum. The narrative ultimately centers on the monomaniacal Glyver's discovery of a usurped inheritance that should have been his birthright, the byzantine particulars of which are drawing him into a final, fatal confrontation with Daunt. 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. Cox is also the author of M.R. James, a biography of the classic ghost-story writer.
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From AudioFile
David Timson is superb in this lengthy melodramatic mystery, reminiscent of Poe's WILLIAM WILSON. As he recounts narrator Edward Glyver's confession, Timson's voice is as shadowy as the dimly lit rooms the players inhabit and as rich and sumptuous as their overwrought Victorian surroundings. Glyver, whose every move is colored by revenge, murders a random victim one night, just to see if he can kill. His true target is his archenemy, Phoebus Daunt, a prominent, popular poet with little talent and fewer scruples. Timson's myriad voices range from puny to plummy, from saintly to shady, each providing a perfect rendering of the character described. As Glyver's tempestuous, obsessive journey leads him through erudition, erotica, opulence, and opium dens, Timson is the listener's perfect guide. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine