The Meaning of Night
by Michael Cox
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael CoxEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Format: Import
Published: 2009-06-16
ISBN: 0771023030
Number of pages: 608
Publisher: Emblem Editions
Book Reviews of The Meaning of Night
Book Review: If The Night Is 16 Hours Long
Summary: 4 Stars
If you like complex stories about lost heritage, secret births, murder, sodomy, opium addiction, betrayal, lost love, and various perfidies told in the fashion of Dickens or some other early 1800s writer you'll like this. If you like long intricate narratives of about 400 pages, this is your cup of tea.
Unfortunately, and hence the 4 star rating, this book is closer to 600 pages. In these type tales details are what fills in the material and makes it worth reading. Trivia can add the atmospheric air that is necessary for this to work really well. Minutiae, however, often makes it hard to tell the details from the trivia and what is essential to the plot to what is tangential, and perhaps superfluous. Way too much of this book is taken up with minutiae. Numerous times we are told, "I was invited to take a glass of tea, which I accepted (or declined)."
I liked this book for the most part, but felt it was way to overblown. Michael Cox, although he has gone on to write other fiction, is primarily an editor and historian of 19th Century fiction and this book all too often reads as history or a chronology. For example there is a library described in general several times, in great (excruciating) detail once, and referred to several times. While the library plays a minor role in the plot, the amount of attention directed at it is out of proportion.
I'll probably read more of Cox's fiction, but be warned that this book is very long. It starts off with a bang and proceeds nicely for about a hundred pages. It then goes into a back story for hundreds of pages, the majority of the book in fact. This back story gets told over and over from several view points until you want to say, "OK, OK, I got it already." On top of that the story is told as if it is actually a discovered manuscript with `Editor's Notes,' and several appendices.
Mr. Cox seems to be an accomplished writer and I hope he learns to `kill the bull' more humanely in the future.
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