En una tormentosa noche de 1816, Mary Shelley y Lord Byron se desafi aron a escribir una historia de miedo. Como resultado, Mary Shelley creó a Frankenstein, mientras que Lord Byron abandonó el relato. Hoy, siglos más tarde, una joven historiadora encuentra documentos que demuestran que el mítico autor llegó a escribir la novela que fue cifrada en un misterioso código matemático por la hija de éste.

Crowley is one of my favorite authors. I've read many of his books and enjoyed all them...[in progress]

A modern web designer who finds some manuscripts while researching Ada Lovelace finds out that they are encrypted. This is a novel within a novel within a novel. A very interesting book. I enjoyed it. It has mystery and drama and action and science. Lots of things happening. ( )

Wow. Finally got to this. Revolves around the discovery of an old sea trunk in which are found, among other things, one page of nearly illegible scrawl (and if you know Byron's handwriting, you're immediately onto that clue) and many pages of numbers, apparently a cypher. Turns out Ada Byron has encoded her father's manuscript of a novel so that it will not, at her mother's and husband's insistence, be destroyed for all time. Ada undertook this massive project in the last year of her life when she knew she was dying (and knew what would become of her papers). She also wrote extensive notes to accompany the manuscript.

The third layer of story--of book within book within book--is of the discovery of the sea chest at the turn of the 21st century by the editor of a women-of-science website and her attempt to decypher the manuscript with the help of her lover (who's numerically inclined) and her estranged father (happily, a Byron scholar).

Many stories are told and retold here.... As an amateur Byron scholar myself (or, at least, a humble enthusiast), who's read any number of attempts to ventriloquize the poet's voice (usually in fictitious attempts to recreate the burnt memoirs), I've never felt before that I was conceivably in his company until now with "his" manuscript THE EVENING LAND. Crowley has really pulled it off.

I don't know what to think about readers coming to the book without extensive background on the Byrons.... Their story is told compellingly here, and that's probably enough. Without deeper biographical info, knowledge of the poetry and letters and journals, etc., Crowley's Byron manuscript can't resonate as deeply, but it's still a ripping yarn, and Crowley fills in a lot, so... I'm just not in a position to say. I loved it. ( )

Crowley imagines what Byron would have written if Byron had written a novel. It's a semi-autobiographical story, full of Romantic and Gothic conventions. The novel is entirely convincing - it reads just like a novel of the period. There is also a frame story. Actually, two frame stories: at the end of each chapter, there are notes attributed to Ada Lovelace, who encrypted the novel in her last painful months while she was dying of cancer in an attempt to hide the novel from her mother. Meanwhile, we also read a series of emails sent to and from the woman who discovered the novel and who relies on her girlfriend to unencrypt it and her estranged father (a Byron expert) to explain its significance and help her understand the book.

The frame story works very well to fully expose the genius of Crowley's hypothetical Byron novel. To fully appreciate the novel, you really have to know a lot about Byron himself, and about the controversy over whether his personality was misunderstood or not. The frame stories also add another theme to the novel that would not be there otherwise - the theme of relationships between fathers and daughters. Ada Lovelace was a child when Byron died, and her mother tried to keep him away from her, so for her, reading and encrypting the novel is a way of getting to know her father and finding his qualities in herself. Smith, the woman who discovers the novel, gets in touch with her estranged father to understand it, and ends up learning about him and reconciling with him. In some ways this theme was a little underdeveloped - the daughters have a respect and love for their fathers, and a capacity to forgive them, that I'm not sure the fathers deserve. ( )