Michael Cox, a longtime editor at Oxford University Press, is publishing his first novel, The Meaning of Night.
What were the literary models for your novel?
The main literary models for the book are the Sensation novels of the 1860s, principally Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White and Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret. But underneath it all is Great Expectations—not in any specific way, but because this, with David Copperfield, was the novel that got me hooked on the mid-Victorian period when I was about 10 or 11.
How long did you work on the complex plot?
I tinkered with it for 30 years, but I could never fire the thing into life. Then, in the spring of 2004, I began to lose my sight as a result of the cancer I've had since the early 1990s. In preparation for surgery, I was prescribed a steroidal drug, which gave me a sustained burst of mental and creative energy; this, combined with the stark realization that treatment might not be successful and that I might eventually go blind, seemed to have a huge catalytic effect.
How did you approach re-creating your Victorian world?
I believe strongly that period is best conveyed not through lengthy descriptions of clothes, décor, etc., but through the texture of the language. I've striven hard to convey an authentic-seeming linguistic ambience—not by attempting sterile academic pastiche but by absorbing the tone and structure of contemporary speech and literary expression and then re-presenting them in a reflexive, natural way.
Why did you present The Meaning of Night as edited by a fictitious academic, J.J. Antrobus, professor of post-authentic Victorian fiction?
The professor's main function is to explain to the reader the references that would have been self-explanatory to the readers themselves. One of the easiest errors to make as a historical novelist is to think you must use all your research, and this often leads to characters explaining or describing things for no reason at all.
Do you read any contemporary fiction?
I read very little contemporary fiction. I adore George MacDonald Fraser's Flashman novels and am an admirer of Bernard Cornwell's storytelling abilities. But I'm an unreconstructed escapist when it comes to fiction, and I'd rather plow my own furrow under the influence of those safely dead authors I admire most, and then hope that readers will like what I've done.
