The Meaning of Night (2006)

The Meaning of Night: A Confession begins with Edward Glyver killing a red-headed man. He doesn't know the man; he ends his life simply to make sure he's capable of killing his nemesis when the time comes. It's an interesting start to the novel, because it makes it difficult right from the beginning to elicit any sympathy for Edward. After dispatching the red-headed man, Edward spends the rest of the book explaining what brought him to this point, and all the wrongs that his nemesis has heaped upon him.

Usually I love books about revenge. Some of my favorites - The Count of Monte Cristo, The Prestige - are well-crafted, compelling vengeance tales. The Meaning of Night, however, misses the mark in a few respects. To begin with, it's about 200 pages too long. By the time I hit page 500, I started to feel annoyed that Edward was still whining about all the terrible things that happened to him. I wanted some action, some movement forward, something.

Secondly, Edward royally screws everything up by "falling in love" with a woman, and as is often the case in Victorian-era stories, he falls in love with her simply by looking at her. They haven't even spoken two words to each other before he announces to the reader that he is now forever her captive. Edmond Dantès certainly never let such stupidity get in the way of his vengeance.

However, Edward Glyver isn't Edmond Dantès, and that does make The Meaning of Night an interesting read. Edward is far from a trustworthy narrator. He's arrogant, short-sighted, and is so fixated on his nemesis that the reader starts to wonder, is Phoebus Daunt really responsible for everything Edward says he is? Or is Edward simply mentally unstable and paranoid?

Overall, I enjoyed this novel and its lush Victorian setting, although it would have benefited from a shorter length and less stupidity on the narrator's part. ( )

Going in, I was delightedly hopeful. Its blurbs make it sound like the next Quincunx or Winter's Tale. Its first line, "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper," is delicious. There's an English great house named Evenwood. Confidence was high.
Coming out, I found the book a pleasure and lots of fun but not at Quincunx's level -- which is an unfair gauge. I wanted it to end differently and there were plenty of red herrings that really were only fish. ( )

I was entertained and at times engrossed in this book, and I loved the atmosphere and general tone of the book, but can't really give it a glowing recommendation.

First off, it was way too long, and long winded. It just didn’t need to take anywhere near that long to tell this story. There were plot points that were brought up in the beginning and never mentioned again until the end, and by that time I’d completely forgotten about them. Most of the problems I had with the book could have been fixed with editing.

I’ve read that the creation of the book flowed from the opening line, but it seemed to me as if the rest of the book went off on it’s own and that part was shoehorned in, the author being too in love with it to cut it. It’s unfortunate because it’s an intriguing line, but sets up the narrator as someone ultimately unlikable right from the start. I didn’t sympathize with him at all throughout the whole long story. That’s not always necessary, but it’s a pretty straightforward story and the appeal would seem to be our feelings for the storyteller. ( )

This book started out great. The first line, "After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper." really hooked me. As the book continued it proved interesting, a tale narrated in the first person by a man of obvious derangement convinced of his own rationality and the fact that he is justified in any action taken towards furthering his own ends.

Cox does an excellent job of capturing the feel of a Victorian novel, and I think that may ultimately have been the problem. As the story continued for page after page I simply got too bogged down in the sheer Victorian-ness of it. Tiny details of little or no interest and constant digressions from the main plot as the narrator sees conspiracies against him in every corner and hidden meaning in every turn of phrase. Sheer number of pages or word count is not usually a huge impediment to me, but there just wasn't enough of a pay-off here for me to have any desire to continue.

Maybe someday I'll come back to this book and see if I'll find it any less of a slog, but this one was just too much for me when I first tried to tackle it. ( )

Written in the style and voice of an author from mid 1850s England. Pretty good I guess, maybe a 7/10. Even though much of its bulk was because of the overblown phrasings of the period, it still could have been edited a bit more severely. It begs the interesting question of how much extraneous description is need when writing in the style of excess? What is extraneous to the essential excessiveness? In other words, how much of the excessiveness is required to maintain the style, beyond which it merely becomes self-indulgent? Can they be separated? ( )