Nodding off

THERE’S something about Victorian London that enthralls readers. Sherlock Holmes, Charles Dickens, that distinctive atmosphere, to say nothing of the fog, are just so compelling; and if a story happens to involve mystery, murder and mayhem, then it’s all the more attractive.

Well, there’s plenty of fog in Michael Cox’s novel, “The Meaning of Night,” and images of Victorian London abound in its 700 pages. This is not surprising, since Cox has edited “The Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories” and is the biographer of M.R. James, that master of the period’s ghost story. This novelist brings to his first work of fiction a prodigious knowledge of Victoriana in its ornate glory, from its defining attitudes to the smallest distinctive details of everyday life. The early sections of the novel -- so crucial to its plot -- take place at England’s premier boarding school, Eton College, and ring particularly true, perhaps because as one steeped in M.R. James, Cox is clearly familiar with his classic memoir, “Eton and King’s.”

With Victorian murder such a favorite of readers, it must be tempting for publishers to seize upon a novel like this one, penned by an author with such an impeccable pedigree, to push as the next big bestseller. Thirty years in the making, imbued with a lifetime’s immersion in the period, this book surely might invite favorable comparison with, say, “Possession,” A.S. Byatt’s masterly evocation of the Victorian period. Alas, it is not in the same league as “Possession” or even the more recent “Arthur & George” by that other superb evoker of the 19th century, Julian Barnes. Rather, Cox’s period detail, those thousands of grace notes on page after page, serve only as ornamentation on a lifeless piece of fiction, which even its sensational, at times violent, subject matter cannot invest with vitality. Getting the little bits right cannot in the end compensate for a plot that is fundamentally hollow at the core.

For a narrative that begins with a murder and reaches its climax hundreds of pages later with another homicide to which all else is inexorably -- and obviously -- leading, “The Meaning of Night” is a remarkably dull read. In large part, this is because the protagonist’s lifelong vendetta -- a poisonous brew of (what else?) envy, jealousy and revenge -- is so tired. Worse yet, it is handled in such a manner that despite much of the book being told in the voice of this antihero, the reader is hard-pressed to gain a real understanding of his motivations.

Round and round goes the narrative, and the more it spins the less you understand about what really makes Edward Glyver tick, let alone get a good look into his psyche. It is probably unfair to any novelist to compare what he is doing with that true 19th century masterpiece “Crime and Punishment,” but in choosing to invest this amount of time and effort purporting to get into the mind of a killer, Cox has opened himself up to such an assessment. Suffice it to say that the reader of “The Meaning of Night” is not witnessing the advent of another Dostoyevsky.

Die-hard fans of the era may well enjoy descriptions such as this one of a Victorian dinner table: “But now the soup and fish had come and gone, and so had the entrees and roasts. The sweets and ices had been cleared away to make room for six huge branched epergnes,* laden with dried fruits, nuts, cakes, and sweet biscuits.” A more genuinely ludic attitude on the part of the author would have allowed these lovely period details not to wither under garlands of asterisks, footnotes and coy editorial commentaries. The hoary device of making the narrative an old manuscript recently uncovered and annotated has seldom seemed more shopworn. And the notes are not all that good: Readers will soon tire of having phrases from the Latin and other tongues translated for them.

Here the author, in the guise of his fictional editor, appends a footnote to the word epergnes, informing the reader that they are “large ornamental dispensers of sweets, etc.” The trouble with this over-decorated and over-determined novel is that if it were an epergne, it would be silver plate rather than sterling and its delicious-looking cakes, fruits and sweetmeats would prove to be made of wax. *