What is the meaning of The Meaning of Night?

It's been a while since I wrote about a straightforward historical novel, without fantasy and/or fairy-tale elements. Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night, which I bought years ago and have finally got around to reading, is as straightforward as they come. Written in the style of a Victorian novel, and set in Victorian England (London, mostly) it was - judging by what I've read while trailing Amazon reviews - a labour of love on the author's part, reputedly thirty years in the making. I'm favourably disposed to fellow ardent fans of the Victorian novel, but although the prose style was thankfully not as knotty as pastiches of this type of novel often are, I nearly gave up after finishing the first section of the book. There was mainly one reason for this: the hero's lack of likeability.

Edward Glyver aka Glapthorn, the protagonist, is something of a puzzle. He has an inflated sense of self-worth, is arrogant, and jumps to conclusions on scant evidence. When he is being blackmailed he immediately suspects his neighbour, the somewhat Heep-ish Fordyce Jukes, of being the culprit for no better reason than that he doesn't like him, and attacks Jukes when he thinks he's caught him in the act. Edward also underappreciates his lovely mistress while sighing for a woman we don't meet for hundreds of pages. What's more, the whole novel starts with Edward killing an innocent stranger merely as a rehearsal for a murder he plans to commit later on. This is such a mindbogglingly stupid idea, even coming from an opium addict, that I for one had no doubt of two things: one, that the reader is not supposed to sympathise with Edward, and two, that he would turn out to be an unreliable narrator, mainly because he would be prone to delude himself as well as the reader. I admit that one reason I persevered with the novel was that I looked forward to the part where it dawns on the conceited Glapthorn just how wrong he has been about everything.

Because that's usually the point of unreliable narrators, isn't it? Either we are constantly interpreting scenes related by them in another way than they do themselves, or there is a great rug-pull waiting for us further down the line where it is revealed that the narrator has either deliberately lied or been mistaken about most things. The fallout is that we're left with a completely different story than it first appeared to be. To make the narrator hard to like is a related ploy, so we won't feel too sorry for them when their world view falls apart. Edward Glyver or Glapthorn fits pretty neatly into this kind of narrator category- or so I imagined.

But what can I say? Edward turns out to be not as deluded as all that. Yes, there are some twists - the major one of which I called, more or less - but quite a few that I was sure would happen never materialised. The absence of more twists became a twist itself. When I realised that we are not meant to completely disregard Edward's judgement after all, I felt a little baffled, though more intrigued than cheated. If Edward is in fact essentially correct in many of what appears to be his far-flung fantasies, why make him such a narcissistic jerk to begin with? It's either a sophisticated double bluff, playing on the reader's expectations, or it's just... well, different.

In the end, I quite enjoyed The Meaning of Night, in spite of never warming to Edward (he does get a little more bearable in the course of the story). The novel is long-winded, and starting the narrative with a long section about the murder of the stranger and its consequences, when we have zero investment in the murderer's fate, feels like a mistake. However, I rather liked not being fed a clear-cut message. If you like the sound of a Victorian revenger's tragedy, this could be worth trying out. After all, revengers are usually bastards, aren't they?