Visit us:
5015 Connecticut Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20008
Directions
Michael Cox is a highly respected biographer and is the editor of the Oxford Book of English Ghost Stories and the Oxford Book of Victorian Detective Stories. His first novel, The Meaning of Night (Norton, $25.95), was an effort thirty years in the making, which sparked a bidding war among publishers. Mark LaFramboise interviewed the author about the novel and the amazing story behind it.
Mark LaFramboise: The Meaning of Night is not only set in the 19th century but presents itself as a found document written in the 19th century, complete with editor's preface and footnotes. The fundamental conflict in the book, though, is a timeless one. What about this period is essential to the telling of the tale?
Michael Cox: The essential period qualities of The Meaning of Night are literary and structural, rather than thematic. The novel uses the conventions of Victorian Sensation fiction, both to locate itself in time, and to explore the limits of those conventions. My ambitions were always pretty simple: to write a literary entertainment that specifically emulated the narrative qualities of the Sensation novel – in particular to devise an intricately contrived, incident-rich, and dramatically powerful story, to serve as a foundation for the development of themes and characters – and to do so, technically speaking, in the way serialized novels of the time were constructed, with the aim of drawing readers on to the next instalment. Wilkie Collins was my main model – I always had in mind his dictum, ‘Make ’em laugh, make ’cry, make ’em wait’, and also his practice of concluding instalments with what he called ‘curtain lines’, intended to ensure readers bought the next issue of the magazine to find out what happened next.
So it’s the narrative environment (so to speak) that is essentially nineteenth century in character. Of course the period setting also influences both the plot possibilities, and the way the characters behave and interrelate; but The Meaning of Night isn’t, and could never be, a nineteenth-century novel – it only pretends to be one. The way the story is told, the voice of the narrator, the period ambience, and the linguistic surface are all, I hope, authentic-seeming; but the period itself merely provides a finally arbitrary setting in which the themes and characterization are developed. It could have been any other historical period; it just so happens that the mid-nineteenth century is where I feel most at home, as both a reader and a writer.
What’s always been important for me is to create a convincing world, in which readers can believe – or, rather, suspend their disbelief. Some would call this escapist fiction; but that’s not a pejorative term for me. There’s plenty to escape from.
ML: While the best 19th century novels portrayed characters with some degree of psychological depth and complexity, Edward in The Meaning of Night is very complex and possesses a pronounced dark side. Assuming that you agree with this observation, is The Meaning of Night really a modern novel masquerading as a 19th century one?
MC: Absolutely right. As I’ve said above, this is written like a nineteenth-century novel, in terms of its structure, plot, language, social conventions, etc., but it can never seek to replicate its models completely. That would be nothing more than sterile pastiche. It does have a modern edge, and designedly so, although I hope it also draws on timeless aspects of good story-telling.
Glyver epitomises this dichotomy: he walks, and talks, and acts like a Victorian; but he is also self-analytical (not to say psychotic) in a way that makes him modern. For me, his obsessional ego, and his ability constantly to adapt himself to different social environments (I think of him, in modern terms, as an operator), also locate him in our century, rather than the nineteenth.
ML: Even Edward's name (Glyver, Glapthorn, Geddington) is an amorphic entity throughout the course of the novel. At the same time, he is piecing together, bit by bit, his own story, and readers are learning more about his character only as you methodically reveal each detail.Can you discuss for just a minute this "slipperiness" of character, the
evanescence of what we think we know and what we ultimately come to know about Edward?
MC: I wanted Glyver to be someone with whom readers would ultimately come to sympathize, but against their better judgement. It’s therefore important to understand why he does what he does, and the stages through which he passes, in terms of what he knows about himself.
Yet Edward never really knows who he is. A rose by any other name might smell as sweet; but for human beings, knowing who you are – having a specific and recognized identity – is psychologically crucial. Conversely, to have this certainty removed, as happens to Edward when he finds out that he is not the person he thought he was, can be traumatic. Once that anchoring has gone, and until he can finally establish his new, and true, identity as Edward Duport, he’s in a kind of psychological free fall. It doesn’t matter what name he calls himself by: for him, until he can finally prove who he is and claim his birthright, one name really is just as good as another, and so he continually slips into temporary identities when circumstances demand.
The really big question, and one that remains unanswered at the end of the novel, because it’s unanswerable, is this: who is he (or, who does he himself think he is) after everything has been taken from him, and he’s living in self-imposed exile on a volcanic island?
ML: Is the character of Phoebius Rainsford Daunt, Edward's arch enemy, a completely fictional character, or is he based on someone from history, or an amalgam of persons?
MC: Daunt is a completely fictional character. I was intrigued by the idea of making him a poet (admittedly not a very good one) who was also a rather gifted criminal – just as Glyver has the instincts of the born scholar but is also physically strong, streetwise, and capable of extreme violence. The irony of course is that Glyver and his enemy are actually two sides of the same coin, and share many of the same character traits. They could almost be brothers. This, by the way, is why I gave Cain Court a fictional name, suggestive of the biblical Cain and Abel: originally I was going to have Glyver kill Daunt there.
ML: Books are crucial at key points in the novel. The found book itself is
an artifact within the storyline (is the storyline!); the library at Evenwood is at the heart of Edward's longing; his mother's journals are the key to his learning about his own identity. How do books figure in the life of Edward? Is there a parallel with the way books are important to you?
MC: Books were crucially important to Edward from childhood. His earliest memories are centred on Gulliver’s Travels, Pilgrim’s Progress, and above all, The Arabian Nights – escape routes into other worlds. He also comes to prize them intellectually – both as vehicles for the best that human beings can think, and as repositories of knowledge – and, through connoisseurship, as historical artefacts. His scholarly passions constitute the main balancing factor in his character, to weigh against his many destructive tendencies.
ML: Who are some of your favorite authors? Did any of them serve as inspiration as you were crafting The Meaning of Night?
MC: Favourite authors (mostly novelists) include: John Donne, Dickens (of course), Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, Arthur Conan Doyle, Rafael Sabatini, JaneAusten, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, Jerome K. Jerome, Agatha Christie, and George MacDonald Fraser – storytellers all. I read very little modern fiction, although I would have given a great deal to have written Sebastian Faulks’s Birdsong, and am currently reading, and much admiring, Julian Barnes’ Arthur and George. I haven’t read The Da Vinci Code . . .
ML: Depicting life in another century must present a writer with a whole host of challenges. You needed to know what people ate and drank, what they wore, how they got around town, not to mention all of the social conventions of the period. What resources did you use to insure that your facts were right?
MC: I’ve been collecting secondary material on the mid-nineteenth century for many years – especially relating to London; and now the internet provides instant access to a wide range of sources. I also consulted experts where necessary – on the genealogical underpinnings of the novel and the legal aspects of the Tansor Barony, for instance, I was advised by the College of Arms in London; and I sought specialist advice on Glyver’s rail journey from Stamford to Cambridge (not as straightforward as you’d think).
There’s actually relatively little description of interiors, food and drink, clothes, etc in The Meaning of Night. I’m rather wary of too much external description, preferring instead to create the period feel through language, and through the way characters relate socially.
ML: Edward, in his way, is a diabolical character, especially for a book's protagonist. While he's a mostly sympathetic character (maybe likable is a better word), his moral compass doesn't always point true north. It seems to me that he must have been great fun to create, a vicarious thrill to walk in his shoes. What was it like to be so deeply inside a character like him?
MC: I’ve come to feel greatly attached to Glyver – a guilty pleasure I seem to be sharing with a lot of others, though we all know we shouldn’t like him (and some people really don’t). Creating him, and his world, has definitely been one of the most satisfying and pleasurable aspects of writing the novel, and there’s been a godlike thrill to bestowing characteristics on him that (secretly) I wish I could lay claim to myself (I doubt, for instance, that I could have charmed Miss Carteret, or Bella Gallini!). And I certainly couldn’t have faced down Josiah Pluckrose . . .
ML: Your story about how this book came to be is an interesting one. Could you relate the story of how you experienced this extreme outpouring of creativity following major surgery?
MC: In April 2004, I began to lose my sight as a result of cancer. In preparation for surgery I was prescribed a steroidal drug, one of the effect of which was to initiate a temporary burst of mental and physical energy, which, combined with the realization that the blindness might return if the treatment was not successful, spurred me on finally to begin writing in earnest the novel that I’d been working on sporadically, and to no real purpose, for over thirty years.
The immediate benefit of the steroids was that I lost my inhibitions, creatively speaking. Whereas before I used to agonize constantly, over all sorts of things, now I just wrote, not really caring whether what I was writing was good or bad. And I was now writing regularly, day after day, and well into the night, so that very soon I was amassing a substantial amount of sequential text, instead of endless bits and pieces. The interesting thing was that, when I came off the medication, the words continued to flow: in fact I wrote most of The Meaning of Night without any artificial stimulants whatsoever.
ML: The book is out. Norton published it beautifully. How has your life changed now that the artistic part of the process has passed and the promotional part has begun?
MC: My life, and that of my wife, has been transformed by The Meaning of Night in so many ways. Finishing the book at the end of 2005 was a major milestone; but now publication is finally underway – in the UK, Germany, the USA, imminently in Canada, and, in due course, in twenty other countries around the world – the promotional commitments are starting to build up. But as an ex-publisher, I know how necessary they are; I also have a Victorian sense of duty. All my publishers have committed a great deal, and not just financially, to this novel, and I’m determined to do everything I can to make it a success – for them, as much as for me.
Both my wife and I are still having to deal with our respective cancers (Dizzy contracted cancer of the tongue last Fall, just as I was finishing The Meaning of Night), and both of us are approaching sixty; so our upcoming 10-city tour of the United States will be pretty gruelling. We’ve had some rough times, but The Meaning of Night has provided us with the means of dealing with them. How could we possibly complain?
Michael Cox
29/9/06