Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "OBSERVE?BUT NO!..." (more)
Key Phrases: analytical engine, Lord Sane, Lady Byron, Lady Sane (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. On a stormy night at Lord Byron's Swiss villa, Mary Shelley challenged her host, her husband and herself to write a ghost story. Mary's, of course, became Frankenstein. Byron supposedly soon gave up his—but, Crowley asks, what if he didn't? The result is this brilliant gothic novel of manners enclosed in two frames. In one, Byron's manuscript comes into the hands of Ada, his daughter by his estranged wife. Ada, in reality, became famous as a proto-cyberneticist, having collaborated on mathematician Charles Babbage's "difference engine." In Crowley's novel, Ada ciphers Byron's work into a kind of code in order to keep it from her mother. The second frame consists of the contemporary discovery of Ada's notes on Byron's story by Alexandra Novak, who's researching Ada for a Web site dedicated to the history of women in science. Alex is, a little too conveniently (this novel's one structural flaw), the estranged daughter of a Byron scholar and filmmaker; her interest in Ada dovetails with her father's interest in Byron, and she's fascinated by the notes and the code both. By applying Byron's scintillating epistolary style to the novel he should have written, Crowley creates a pseudo-Byronic masterpiece. The plot follows Ali, the bastard son of Lord "Satan" Sane and an unfortunate minor wife of a minor Albanian "Bey." Sane finds and takes the boy, aged 12, back to Regency England. Ali's life is filled with gothic events, from the murder of his father (of which he is accused) to his escape from England with the help of a "zombi," the fortuitous and critical aid he gives the English army at the Battle of Salamanca and his love affair with a married woman. The myth of Byron's lost papers has a catalyzing effect on American literary genius, giving us James's Aspern Papers and now Crowley's best novel.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From The Washington Post

Today is the birthday of one of the great horror stories of all time. It was a dark and stormy night in 1816 at a villa on Lake Geneva, Switzerland. George Gordon Byron, Percy Shelley and Shelley's girlfriend, Mary Godwin, were trying to scare each other by reading ghost stories. Lord Byron, already the subject of frightening rumors, suggested they write spooky tales of their own. Shelley never got anywhere with his, but Godwin -- only 18 at the time -- eventually produced Frankenstein, a story destined to come back to life again and again in a thousand different mutations. Byron, meanwhile, began a story about a mysterious old man who dies while traveling in the East, but he never wrote more than a couple thousand words. Or did he?

In an astounding display of scholarship and imagination, John Crowley has stitched together pieces of biography, literary history, textual criticism, computer science and cryptography to produce a novel about Byron's lost masterpiece. In the words of Dr. Frankenstein: "It's alive!"

We experience this novel as a collection of interspersed texts. The central one, named in the subtitle, is a romance, allegedly written by Lord Byron, called "The Evening Land." It tells the sprawling tale of Ali Sane -- abandoned as a baby in Albania, reclaimed to England as a young teenager by his evil father and finally launched on a life of terrible hardships, false accusations, narrow escapes, shipwrecks, duels, warfare and murder. (There are some zombies, too.)

Between the pages of this wildly ornate story appear footnotes written by Byron's daughter Ada, Countess Lovelace, who was a brilliant mathematician and a startlingly prescient theorist about what would become known as the computer. She has no personal memories of her father; her parents separated when she was less than a year old, and her mother took every precaution to crush any signs of paternal poetics (or madness). But Ada nursed a deep, if secret, affection for her father, she tells us, and when a lengthy prose manuscript in Lord Byron's handwriting was offered to her through a dark, circuitous path, she took it -- if only to preserve the document from the flames Lady Byron had fed with her husband's memoirs. "I have," Ada writes, "the temerity to provide a number of notes, illuminating where I can the matter of this curious tale, and connecting its accounts to the scenes of my father's life, of which, I am obliged to admit, I have often little personal knowledge."

Finally, mixed among chapters of Byron's novel and his daughter's notes are e-mail messages about the discovery of a curious packet of pages covered with columns of numbers written by Ada in the mid-19th century. (But I won't ruin it for you; like Don Juan, "I therefore deal in generalities.") Alexandra Novak, the protagonist of this modern subplot, has traveled to England to redesign a Web site on women scientists. But she quickly grows obsessed with determining what all those numbers mean, a project that requires the help of her lover, a computer scientist, and her father, a Byron expert (and sex criminal) from whom she's been estranged for many years. If you don't detect a parallel plot here, jump to the next review.

Crowley is growing into something of a specialist on textual mysteries. His most recent novel, The Translator (2002), was about an exiled Soviet poet whose verse may have secretly defused the Cuban missile crisis. That novel was more affecting, even if it wasn't the awesome Rubik's Cube this new one is. The mechanics of decoding Ada's numbers, the laconic nature of her footnotes and the disjointed repartee of e-mail conversations produce a fascinating puzzle, but they keep Lord Byron's Novel from developing the emotional intimacy that Crowley showed in The Translator when, for instance, Innokenti Falin and his American graduate assistant sit at the kitchen table, struggling to bring his forbidden poems into English.

Or maybe it's fairer to say that in this new novel Crowley has shifted even more of the work onto his readers: "Some Assembly Required." He hasn't stooped to the level of A.S. Byatt's mind-numbing The Biographer's Tale, which reproduced hundreds of jumbled note cards from a research project in process, but he does demand an extraordinary degree of attention.

The text of "The Evening Land" is such a miraculous imitation of Byron's style and such a clever incarnation of his biography that it's tempting to believe Crowley might have discovered a long-lost manuscript after all. But interest in it will depend upon how much you enjoy early 19th-century romances and how much you can tolerate stylistic excesses such as this: "It is a day in May, that one glorious day in May upon which all romances begin, and some true stories too -- this present one falling somewhat flatly between the two -- & the day, whether in May or November, fine or foul, is of no relevance whatever, and is only brought in to induce a sense of pleasant expectation, that the tale is commencing or rather re-commencing -- as it should." After several hundred pages of that, I began to pine for columns of numbers. The problem is compounded by the fact that Ali, the autobiographical protagonist of Byron's novel, is something of a blank: a brave, righteous innocent to whom strange and awful things happen and happen and happen without providing much development. He's a wooden statue tossed on the exciting waves of this plot.

True to Crowley's extraordinary subtlety, the most touching moments of Lord Byron's Novel step lightly through Ada's footnotes. Buried amid her explanations about various places, people and events mentioned in "The Evening Land" are casual asides that suggest the depth of her longing for a father she never knew. Those sighs of affection echo the sentiment we can detect in the e-mail messages between Alexandra and her father as they pursue this academic discovery while trying -- haltingly, timidly -- to breach years of blame, guilt and regret. By the end of this remarkable book, several hearts have finally found the peace they deserve, but our glimpses of young Ada -- brilliant, dying and essentially imprisoned by her mother -- attain the same haunting power as the legends of her untamed father.

Reviewed by Ron Charles
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: William Morrow (June 14, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060556587
• ISBN-13: 978-0060556587
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (20 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #930,113 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Is there any spur to our feelings that is as sharp as Renunciation?", July 23, 2005

By	Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (COMMUNITY FORUM 04)

The young son of an Albanian mother is discovered in Albania by his Scottish father, Lord Sane, who brings him back to a deteriorating manse in Scotland and schools him for a new life as his heir. Ali, the boy, apparently tainted by the Sane family curse, soon begins his misadventures. A painful young love, a gruesome hanging, an escape by ship in the moonlight, the discovery of a young woman masquerading as a boy, ominous sleepwalking episodes, the periodic appearance of a bear, the arrival of a ghostly double, false imprisonment--all these events figure in Ali's story, which illustrate all the complications of a Gothic romance.

Author John Crowley presents Ali's story as the missing novel written by George Gordon, Lord Byron in 1816, creating a scenario in which Byron's missing manuscript is sold to finance Byron's involvement in European movements promoting Liberty and Freedom. Clear parallels exist between events in Ali's story and events in Byron's life, but Crowley also connects Bryon, through his manuscript, with the life of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace, Byron's estranged daughter.

In a third plot line, a web site designer, Alexandra Novak, known as "Smith," is working on a site devoted to women's science history. Georgiana, her client, purchases some papers found in a seaman's trunk which once belonged to Ada's son Byron, who ran away to sea. Georgiana shows Smith a single sheet of an unknown manuscript in Byron's handwriting, but there are many additional pages containing long columns of numbers, their importance unknown. Smith's attempts to discover the secret to the numbers, written by Ada, unfold simultaneously with Ali's story.

Crowley maintains his fine sense of where and when to change the focus from Ali to Ada to Smith in order to keep the tension and interest high, creating intriguing plot lines which intersect and gradually reveal parallels in the lives of the characters. Life, love, betrayal, alienation, separation and reconciliation are themes pervading all the subplots, and the coincidences and moments of revelation, common to all romantic novels, keep the reader intrigued.

There is no real suspense, however. Crowley begins the novel with an episode from Ali's life, making it obvious from the beginning that Byron's novel IS discovered. The biographies of Bryon and Ada are well documented, and no suspense evolves from new discoveries. The episodes in Ali's life are similar to those in many other Gothic romances, not unique. Still, I found the novel to be a delightful read--a terrific escape into romanticism, possibly the most classically romantic novel in recent years. n Mary Whipple

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars more accessible and sometimes more entertaining than crowley's previous great books, July 9, 2005

By	Mina (New York) - See all my reviews

Although I take issue with what some reviewers here have said--that this is Crowley's best book (no way, that's "Little, Big")--I think that "Lord Byron's Novel" is certainly one of the two or three best novels of this year. It really is extraordinary and audacious: a novel-within-a-novel written entirely in the idiom of 19th century England--punctuated by a epistolary novel written by electronic mail! What the hell? This is bizarre stuff, and it doesn't always work, but for the most part it absolutely does, and the book is incredibly entertaining and inventive. From the Polanski-like contemporary father to the Satanic Lord Sane in Byron's lost novel, there are some extremely memorable characters here...quite honestly, I was thrilled by the whole novel.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Talk about a split personality, October 5, 2005

By	Rachel (Bronx, NY) - See all my reviews

I enjoyed the half of this book that I read--which is to say, I found the Byronic novel-within-novel completely unreadable (and I am a fan of overembellished, melodramatic nineteenth-century novels, so this was actually the part of the book to which I was most looking forward), but was completely engrossed by the relationships depicted and developed through the series of emails. To me, those were the richest and most eloquent part of the novel, and I could easily have spent another 200 pages with those three characters. (Every time I would hit a section of "novel," I would get irritated at being interrupted.) So I'm not sure if I would recommend this book or not, as the only way I could enjoy it was not to read half of it.