The School of Night by Louis Bayard

A book review

"Black is the badge of hell,/The hue of dungeons and the school of night," wrote Shakespeare in Love's Labour's Lost, an insult delivered by one character to another with black hair. Did he mean anything special by "school of night" (assuming he didn't mean "suit of night" or "scowl of night" as in some editions)? Arthur Acheson speculated in his 1903 work Shakespeare and the Rival Poet that the phrase might refer to a secret society formed by Queen Elizabeth's courtier Walter Raleigh and other intellectuals, including astronomer Thomas Harriot, who made a drawing of the moon viewed through a telescope months before Galileo did.

Bayard's novel opens in Washington D.C. in 2009. Henry Cavendish, a washed-up academic, is serving as executor of the estate of his old friend Alonzo Wax, an avid collector of antiquarian books. After the funeral, a suspiciously suave Englishman offers Henry a stupendous sum to locate an Elizabethan manuscript he claims Alonzo stole from him, a previously unknown letter from Raleigh (or Ralegh, as scholars now spell his name) mentioning "our homelie Schoole." It might be the evidence Henry and Alonzo had long been seeking that the "School of Night" truly existed. Henry accepts the offer, and bodies begin dropping. Obviously, the document is of more than academic interest.

Although more than half the novel is set in the present day, its most moving and well-crafted scenes take place in 1603 England after Queen Elizabeth's death, a politically perilous time for Ralegh and his friends, who have been accused of atheism. This story-within-a-story centers on Thomas Harriot, whose one voyage to the New World has left him with a melancholy that "coats him like ash," and on the fictional serving woman with whom he slowly falls in love. While the present-day story is a better-than-average thriller, it's the 1603 story with its deeply textured historical detail and haunting prose that will sweep history lovers off their feet. (2010; 338 pages)