Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land
Categories: Staff Picks , Fiction
You might (well, you might!) remember my enthusings about Headlong, Michael Frayn’s bravura art history thriller about a long-lost Breugel painting. I called that and A. S. Byatt’s Possession, a novel about a long-secret romance between two Victorian writers, my top two literary puzzle novels of all time.
Well, here’s another novel for fans of that genre. This one’s about a long-lost manuscript that may be the work of Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the daughter of dashing Romantic poet Lord Byron—or may be the work of Byron himself.
Like Headlong and Possession, it’s a sophisticated puzzle that unwraps itself, layer by layer, like an onion. And like those novels, it’s a work of extraordinary scholarship, dazzling literary technique, and absorbing suspense.
As Lord Byron’s Novel opens, a feminist researcher is in England to work on a website about Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the nineteenth-century mathematician who predicted computer programming from the potential of Charles Babbage’s calculating machine.
Through emails to her lover and to her father, who is a Byron scholar and Polanski-esque exiled filmmaker, the narrator describes how she has been offered papers purported to belong to Ada’s son. The papers are sheet after sheet of numbers in what may be Ada’s handwriting, so naturally there’s much excitement that they may be an early piece of theoretical software.
What they turn out to be is equally exciting—as the reader suspects from alternating chapters, which are a Gothic tale about an Albanian boy, the exiled son of a cruel British nobleman.
John Crowley has written an astonishingly complex, highly satisfying story-within-a-story-within-a-story, a triple tale of estranged fathers and daughters, marriage, sex, scandal, and exile. It takes considerable boldness to write a novel as though it is the lost work of one of literature’s most infamous figures, and even more extraordinary skill to frame it within two additional stories that echo and amplify it. But if you can write like this, boldness pays off—Lord Byron’s Novel is absolutely splendid.
