Joe Murphy on The Meaning of Night
Well, it's technically still summer, but the Fall book season is in full swing, and Fall titles are coming in fast and furious. As I mentioned last week, the other buyers and I have been deep in the throes of picking titles for our annual Holiday Gift Guide. Our biggest problem really is the number of great titles coming, and this is a partularly strong fiction season. New works are coming from Dave Eggers, Walter Mosley, John Mortimer, Isabel Allende, John Le Carre, Mark Haddon, Edward Jones (we have signed first editions in stores now!!!), Cormac McCarthy, Richard Ford, and even Thomas Pynchon has a 992-page extravaganza on the way.
There's also been great review attention for Marisha Passl's Special Topics in Calamity Physics and Claire Messud's The Emperor's Children. I'd just like to throw one more great fall novel into the mix: first-time author Michael Cox's just-published The Meaning of Night. It's an immensely entertaining narrative with a perfect-pitch Victorian setting and a completely riveting narrator/lead character: Edward Glyver. Glyver seems at first to be competing for the Unreliable Narrator Hall of Fame, opening the book with the stunning sentence: " After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for supper." That, and his seemingly unreasoning hatred of doggerel-poet Phoebus Rainsford Daunt (do names come any better?) make the opinions he offers the reader seem highly suspect.
The novel serves up all the great conventions of Victorian literature: questions of inheritance, a fight over the most beautiful estate in England, and colorful (and colorfully named) characters galore. Glyver views Daunt as a master criminal who ruined Glyver's prospects; Glyver immerses himself in the seedy Victorian underworld, doing dirty work for a powerful law firm, and bides his time, waiting to take revenge on Daunt. As the plot unravels, the reader realizes that perhaps Glyver's assessment of Daunt isn't that far off the mark; in fact, Glyver's biggest problem with Daunt may turn out to be that he has underestimated him.
The settings range from Evenwood, the gorgeous estate that Cox succeeds so well in making a perfect object of desire, to the most disreputable corners of 19th century London. The plot encompasses murder, manipulation, and conspiracy on a grand scale. The result is what may be my favorite novel of the season, an absolute must-read, and (naturally) an Olsson's
See you in the stores,
Joe Murphy
Head Book Buyer
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