It takes an estimated one million crocus stigmas to make one kilo of

It takes an estimated one million crocus stigmas to make one kilo of saffron. Sassafras, an essential ingredient of gumbo, is “not normally available in the UK” because of its addictive properties. We learn that poppy seeds are used as a sedative and aphrodisiac. The first half of his final work resembles a conventional cookbook, but the lively introductions to the 200 recipes go far beyond the norm.

We learn, for example, that the Romans were the first to plant mustard in Britain. (The spice goes particularly harmoniously with rabbit, also introduced by the Romans.) The Tanzanian dish of salt fish curry was introduced by Portuguese spice traders. Read as a madman’s rant in which nothing is reliable , The Meaning of Night is a journey into darkness whose bleak sense of entrapment is only occasionally lightened by doomed Glyver’s triumphs.Roz Kaveney’s ‘Teen Dreams’ is published by IB Tauris. The World of Spice, by Michael Bateman (KYLE CATHIE £14.99 (240pp))

The fruit of a life-long obsession with spices, this book was the long-cherished project of The Independent on Sunday’s celebrated food editor, who died earlier this year.

Even the clues he uses to solve mysteries are from areas of knowledge – the Victorian underworld, the higher bibliography – that we need to have explained to us.Read as if every word were reliable, this is a rich and complicated tale of a man wronged beyond endurance who takes an almost pointless revenge knowing that it will change nothing. Glyver finds no contradiction in his chaste passion for the woman he loves, his amiable devotion to his courtesan mistress and his casual sodomising of young whores picked up in the street; he is a man of a time not our own, and some of the time he seems like an alien. Like Charles Palliser, Michel Faber and Sarah Waters, Cox is making the Victorian era a switchback ride for the reader’s mind.Because written in a fairly accurate rendition of Victorian prose, and dotted with all the observations and references appropriate to a narrative of the 1850s, Cox’s book also sets side by side the Victorian mind as it liked to think of itself and as we know it to have been. As a novel of sensation, it is as outrageous in its use of coincidence and surprise as any book by Wilkie Collins or Dickens. Cox is free to get away with all this because he is playing by the rules of another time and its favourite fictions. Cox makes us read his novel as if it were two texts, the Victorian narrative of intrigue and the modern novel of psychopathology, which overlay each other.This is a story that, in summary, stretches plausibility: of revenges that involve staggering injustices and dastardly plots requited with equal violence.

It is never entirely clear how much he tells us is true, even within the confines of a novel.
Glyver is a good hater, with reason to hate. According to his version, the poet Phoebus Daunt got him expelled from Eton long before Daunt set about acquiring the inheritance and fianc?that Glyver claims should be his by right. If Glyver is sane, all this may be true; but we know he is deeply amoral and deeply troubled. So it was hardly to be supposed that his first novel would stay away from the period, or from the uncanny and elaborately plotted.