I finally finished reading this book yesterday. Its a big book – 600 pages – and I was a bit worried when it arrived in the post as I had agreed to review it within a week but was about to go away camping for 4 days. Fortunately it was a real page-turner and I desperately wanted to find out what happened next. Here is what I thought:

A book with so many twists, turns, surprises and teases is very difficult to review without spoiling it for other readers, but I will try not to give too much away.

I very rarely read historical fiction, a recent exception was Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, to which some people have compared this book. Both books are enormous, feature main characters with obsessive passions for book collections, and are written with a painstaking attention to historical detail. The comparison only goes so far, as The Meaning of Night is very much a realistic novel without the magical aspects of Jonathan Strange.

Another comparison which has been made is with Charles Dickens. Again this could be a result of the epic scale of this book, but also of the contemporary time frame. The difference is that, although not as explicitly salacious as, for example, The Vesuvius Club, there are still details in this book which could never have been published in Dickens’ time.

Perhaps the most interesting comparison I have heard is with the Sherlock Holmes stories. Interesting because, although set slightly earlier than the Sherlock Holmes stories, the main character does indeed work in the capacity as a private investigator and have a fondness for opium and laudanum, but this is only peripheral to the main plot. However, he is doing the work that a real modern private investigator would do – getting evidence for divorce cases for example – rather than the murder-mystery work of traditional fictional detectives. Having said that, in P. Rainsford Daunt there is a recognisable Moriarty figure, and at times I was wondering if his actions and influence were real or just paranoia on the part of the Edward Glyver character.

As a non-reader of historical fiction I was a little apprehensive about reading this book, but it does start with a bang and quickly follows that up with tantalising hints of surprises to come. The greatest achievement of the book is how quickly it makes the reader sympathetic towards a character who is first introduced in the act of murdering an innocent man for no good reason. Only by the end of the book do we learn the full motives and pressure on Edward Glyver, but by then he has been long forgiven.

Various plot turns depend on events which appear at first to be extremely convenient and unlikely coincidences – a bit like the plot devices in Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native. At first I was mildly irritated by these, but soon found myself mentally apologising to the author when there turned out to be perfectly good reasons for these. I took this as a form of authorial teasing: appearing to be taking the easy way out, and then showing that there had actually been a lot of work to make it look so easy.

The book is written in the first person as a contemporary account of affairs, using the device of a fictional editor who has recently found the manuscript and has added his own footnotes of explanation. It is a device often used in Sherlock Holmes pastiches and can be obtrusive. In this case it is handled well, allowing the author to write the main text using his obviously extensive knowledge of Victoriana but giving an excuse for footnotes to explain the less familiar terms.

Nearly everything I would like to say about this book would involve giving away something, and a great deal of the enjoyment of the story is in experiencing the sudden changes of direction without warning, right the way up to the very brave ending. If you want to know what that ending is and why it is so brave you will have to read it yourself, but you are unikely to regret it

There is more about the book here and you can buy it here or at your local bookstore.