Lord Byron's Novel: The Evening Land (P.S.)

One of our most accomplished literary artists, John Crowley imagines the novel the haunted Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned...but very well might have.

Saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Byron's own abandoned daughter, Ada, the manuscript is rediscovered in our time — and almost not recognized. Lord Byron's Novel is the story of a dying daughter's attempt to understand the famous father she longed for — and the young woman who, by learning the secret of Byron's manuscript and Ada's devotion, reconnects with her own father, driven from her life by a crime as terrible as any of which Byron himself was accused.

"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. Agent, Ralph Vicinanza. (June)" Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)

"Crowley's use of three different devices — Byron's work, a convincing piece of romantic fiction rich with thinly disguised autobiographical elements; Ada's annotations; and a series of e-mails exchanged in the present day — adds up to an intriguing and multilayered whole." Booklist

"Crowley's...magnificent new novel is multilayered and convoluted, a story within a story within a story that spans three centuries." Library Journal

"In an astounding display of scholarship and imagination, John Crowley has stitched together pieces of biography, literary history, textual criticism, computer science and cryptography." Washington Post

"Throughout, the novel-within-a-novel is pitch-perfect Byron and always engrossing....However, it is the two other narrative layers, which interrupt, explain and reflect on Byron's hitherto lost whiz-bang, that give Lord Byron's Novel its powerful emotional resonance." Peter Straub, Los Angeles Times

"[A] ripping good story....Complex and satisfying, pleasurably dizzying in its layers and self-references, and addictively readable." Kirkus Reviews

"Crowley's use of three different devices...adds up to an intriguing and multilayered whole. This book should appeal to fans of another literary mystery, A. S. Byatt's Possession." Booklist

"Though it's an impertinent undertaking, it's also a beautiful success....Both charmingly romantic and stoically realistic." Seattle Times

"Crowley's real achievement...is not a convincing imitation of Byron....[M]ore persuasive by far is the suffocating world of encryption and code, coincidence and conspiracy, paranoia and parapsychology that Crowley summons from his 19th-century documents and 21st-century decoders." Christopher Benfey, the New York Times Book Review

Spanning three centuries, Lord Byron's Novel interweaves three separate strands into one magnificent tale: the stories of a lost novel by Lord Byron, the daughter who tried to save it, and the woman who discovered her secret.

Crowley delivers a stunning act of literary impersonation: imagining the novel the haunted, enigmatic Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned but very well might have--a story of two women from different centuries bound together by love, loss, and a need to connect with the fathers who abandoned them.

John Crowley lives in western Massachusetts with his wife and twin daughters. He is the author of The Deep; Beasts; Engine Summer; Little, Big; The Translator; the Ægypt series; and the short fiction collection Novelties & Souvenirs.