Eminent (but ruthless) Victorians

The Meaning of Night: A Confession
By Michael Cox
Norton, 703 pp., $25.95

Through the swirling nighttime fogs of 1850s London the narrator advances upon a stranger and stabs him fatally in the neck. No acte gratuit this, as in "Crime and Punishment." Edward Charles Glyver is simply practicing his stroke for the assassination of his lifelong enemy: that human snake in lordling's clothing who since boyhood has betrayed him, and usurped not only his rightful inheritance but, still worse . . .

No, can't finish that. Michael Cox's 700-page pastiche of eye-rolling Victorian revenge melodrama , "The Meaning of Night," is all plot, or rather, all plots within plots; and it's a puzzle how to write about it without giving them away.

Its actors, with a single exception, are little besides corkscrewing alarums and excursions with captions for characters (wicked, saintly, hapless). Its moral, social , and psychological illuminations possess zero wattage. Its language is fustian ("Was this my fate, to be forever pushed and pulled , now this way, now that, by the winds and currents of circumstance, without respite?" ).

There is a wink here and there. Cox, who has edited collections of Victorian ghost and detective stories, uses a favorite 19th-century beginning, the editor's note that introduces an undiscovered manuscript. ( This saves the cold-water plunge of a real beginning and, like a once-upon-a-time for grown-ups, ranges the readers in a circle ready to attend.) His editor, though, is J. J. Antrobus, professor of post- authentic Victorian fiction at Cambridge University.

A reasonable description of " Night," in fact. Cox is clearly having fun: the book is often ingenious , and stuffed with authentic Victorian names, places, and manners. Opposite to Marianne Moore's dictum about poetry, Cox creates real gardens and puts imaginary toads in them; a less vital project than Moore's, particularly since his toads are not especially well imagined.

So regard "Night" as funhouse travel rather than the real thing that takes you somewhere and changes you. This takes you nowhere, but the ride itself provides unstoppable spooky movement and no possibility of getting off. The popping-out monsters, the sepulchral moans and laughs, the damp seaweed-stuff that brushes the face, are rickety and absurd, but they do what they are meant to.

Cox's practice killing, coming at the start of the book, has its chronological place near the end of his story. What happens thereafter is one more undisclosable. The life story that leads up to all this, comprised by most of the pages, is recounted to an old friend, in a sequence that can occasionally confuse. To sketchily summarize the plot:

Edward, brought up poor by his apparent mother, a hack writer and devoted to him, is visited by a "Miss Lamb," who has him sent to Eton and gives him a box full of gold. He does brilliantly but is undone by the smarmy Phoebus Daunt , who gets him expelled by framing him with the theft of a book.

Edward, his prospects ruined, pursues arcane studies in Germany and learns all about rare books, of which we will hear an agreeable lot. Phoebus wins a brilliant scholarship to Cambridge and, through his clergyman and bibliophile father (lots more books), becomes the protégé of the immensely rich and powerful Baron Tansor, whose only son (seemingly) has died, and who longs for an heir.

Tansor decides to adopt Phoebus. This eternal worm -- Cox has no interest in character development -- becomes a dreadful but much-praised poet. All the while he secretly performs all manner of profitable and repulsive crookeries and cruelties.

Going through his "mother's" notebooks, meanwhile, Edward discovers that his real mother was "Miss Lamb , " who in fact was Tansor's first wife. Thus are born the strong suspicion of a claim to what Phoebus is about to receive, and Edward's fury, which swells with the proof he gradually accumulates that he is the rightful heir, and Phoebus the usurper.

The greater part of "Night" is taken up by Edward's quest. It is immensely involved, bringing in a whole variety of actors, some of whom help Edward and others who work against him. It is crowded with discoveries, hidden documents, and melodramatic revelations. Edward is continually on the point of securing his claim, only to have it snatched away. His " Perils of Pauline " ups and downs hint, as elsewhere, at an author satirizing his genre even as he thunderously advances it.

Yet it is the very complication and convolution of plot that is the book's real strength. Despite much padding to imitate the deliberate pace of Victorian fiction, and an ornate style that is as much wind-drag as ornament, Cox achieves authentic suspense.

He sharpens our need to know what will happen, even if we may not care much about, or believe in, those it will happen to. The exception is Emily, a member of Tansor's household. Beautiful, alternately harsh and tender, angry and melting, she remains an enigma even after her enigma is revealed.

Edward's final comeuppance, a last betrayal just when triumph seemed certain -- and one that goes far deeper than the matter of inheritance -- is agonizing. Astonishing too, yet oddly, admirably prepared for.

Richard Eder reviews books for several publications.