#RIPXII 2: The Meaning of Night

I didn't waste any time getting to my reread of Michael Cox's The Meaning of Night this RIP season. I read this book near when it came out in 2006, a couple of years before I started blogging, so all I really had in the old noggin were memories of super-enthusiastic feelings. I was quite nervous in case the book didn't live up to those.

The story follows Edward Glyver as he tries to regain a birthright that he was kept from as a child and to get revenge for wrongs done to him as a youth. He fights against Phoebus Daunt, a poet and scoundrel, who is attempting to con his way into that birthright and into the heart of Emily, the same woman who Edward has fallen in love with. I know that sounds a bit stodgy and, well, Victorian, but that's because I didn't share the first line yet --

After killing the red-haired man, I took myself off to Quinn's for an oyster supper.

Yes, Glyver lets us know from the first sentence that he is a murderer. And, from there, the story continued to keep my attention. It was smart and twisty and made great use of Cox's extensive knowledge of history and literature. I'm so glad that I reread it and it has re-whetted my appetite for Wilkie Collins and the other Victorian sensationalists. Not all books need supernatural villains, for there's truly nothing so scary as the evil men do.

Sussing the truth,
K

#RIPXI : 10, Rustication

One of the books that I was specifically saving all year to read during the RIP Challenge was Rustication by Charles Palliser. His books are always dark and moody and tense and perfect for when the days get shorter and the rainy hours outnumber the dry ones. When our power went out on Thursday night as the wind and rain beat down on us, I couldn't resist popping my book-light on this book and diving into the Victorian English marshes.

The story is written as the journal of one Richard Shenstone, seventeen years old and recently expelled, or rusticated, from Cambridge. His father has recently died but Richard doesn't really even know how because his mother and sister won't tell him. They didn't even tell him about the death and he had to find out from a newspaper. But now that he has been sent down from school, he has had to move in with them, into the dilapidated manor that is now his mother's only possession. What happened with his father and why his remaining family is treating him like an imposition is only one of the mysteries in this twisty, opium-and-hormone-tinged tale.

With an incredibly unreliable narrator but also an unreliable everyone else, this is a crazy and sometimes frustrating story. But it comes together in a satisfying way and it's on par with The Unburied, Palliser's other tale set in the fictional town of Thurchester. Neither of these books provoked the visceral reaction that I had to The Quincunx so now I want to go back and read that again to confirm that it really is Palliser's best work. But, even when he's not at his peak, he is still a master of gothic atmosphere and peril.

In the mood for misery,

K

A Year of Dickens: New Release: The Solitary House

I asked for a Library Thing review copy of The Solitary House by Lynn Shepherd (called Tom-All-Alone's in the UK) knowing only the briefest of details about it but knowing also that it was bound to fit my interests perfectly. So imagine my joyful surprise when I read the first sentence of the book and immediately recognized it as being almost the exact starting words as one of my favorite Dickens novels, Bleak House --

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln’s Inn Hall.

However, Shepherd's story starts as Michaelmas term has lately begun because this is not the story of Esther Summerson and her family and friends, although that story does live in the background of this one. Rather, it is the story of Charles Maddox, a detective who is trying track down a child that has gone missing many years before. While trying to care for his ailing uncle and mentor, he is summoned to the powerful Mr. Edward Tulkinghorn and is given a seemingly simple case by the formidable lawyer. The ways that these two stories eventually come together is unimaginable, the cases turning out to be just as twisted as the course that Shepherd leads us down through this marriage of old and new stories.

After the pleasant surprise that this was a novel inspired by Dickens, I was even more thrilled to see another favorite novel incorporated later in the tale -- which I won't reveal to you because it's quite a wonderful and unexpected thing. I immediately wanted to reread these two favorites because The Solitary House is written from a place of devotion to these novels and it comes through constantly. But the story that Shepherd has created on her own is just as strong and my worry that it wouldn't live up to the novels that it borrowed from was unfounded. The only moment I was unhappy was when I had to relive one of the saddest moments in Bleak House and, in my opinion, in all of literature. Regardless of my dread of that heartbreaking scene, this was a wonderful novel that would have made Dickens proud in its exposure and denunciation of some of the myriad injustices of Victorian London. I can't wait to read Shepherd's next novel (and I've decided to reread Bleak House for my Year of Dickens after all).

A wonderful read lately over,
K

"My name, in those days, was Susan Trinder."

I don't know why I was so tentative about picking up a book by Sarah Waters.  I think it was because I'm very picky about this genre of book -- modern novels with Victorian settings and sensational topics.  When I read a bad one, it almost makes me angry.  After all, there are fantastic actual Victorian sensational novels out there already as examples.  But I had heard enough good things about Sarah Waters that I felt safe finally trying one of her books.  I asked around for suggestions on where to start and ended up pulling Fingersmith from my TBR pile.

As a novel with many twists and turns, it's hard to summarize without giving anything away so this is very vague.  Susan Trinder is a young woman raised in London in a less than wholesome household -- a place where goods are fenced and babies are raised for sale.  However, the owner of the house, Mrs. Sucksby has always done her best to keep Susan innocent.  And yet the time comes for Susan to help the household and give them all a chance to live the good life.  But, of course, things are not as straightforward as they seem and the good life may be out of everyone's reach.

So if I had to give this one a grade , it would be between B+ and A-.  I liked it quite a bit but didn't absolutely love it.  After an extremely complex plot, I found the ending to be just a bit too neat.  Also, some of the characters and relationships weren't as well defined as they could have been.  However, since I've already admitted that this is exactly the genre of book that I'm most picky about, you can take my complaints with a large grain of salt.  This is a good book.

Smoothing my petticoats,
K


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