The advert on the wall of Marylebone tube station was indeed large and it pleased me immensely. It was advertising Tracy Chevalier’s latest novel ‘The Glassmaker’ and I understood it immediately. I knew the book had come out last year but now they were telling me it was available in paperback. I had been restrained, not always the case, and now I could buy it.
We were on our way to an exhibition at the Royal Academy in Piccadilly. Right opposite is Hatchards, the oldest bookshop in the country, circa 1790, and that’s where I headed after we had had some lunch.
I didn’t have to ask for the book or look very hard as the counter was covered with neat piles of the novel. The girl serving was engaging and keen to chat about Tracy Chevalier who had recently been in to sign 200 books. She was apologetic that she didn’t seem to have any signed copies left but I assured her that I really didn’t mind. I didn’t, it was the story I wanted.
This is the book that should accompany anyone on a visit to Venice. I went there in 2005 but I have no idea what reading I took with me. It should have been this. Like the city, this story is deep, rich, slightly exotic and completely satisfying. It is one of those books that you come across now and again that you can’t stop reading but at the same time you can’t bear to finish.
So, we begin in Venice in the year 1486, looking over the lagoon at the island of Murano. It is the island of the glassmakers and for a while it is omnipotent in Europe. The secrets and skills of making glass are closely guarded and it is many years before other cities, for instance Prague, are able to build up their own glass industry. Orsola Rosso is our heroine and heroic indeed she is. We walk with her through war, family difficulties, lost love and plague. Working life is hard but more so for a woman who is allowed so few choices. She has the intelligence to know which battles to fight, when to keep quiet about her actions and how to, sometimes, get her own way.
This story travels from the late 1400s to 2020, covid times, only a few years ago. However, Orsola is still the same Orsola, the same woman. When I first realised what was going on I thought, OK we are in the realms of magic realism here, a literary trope that I associate more with Elif Shafak but not with Tracy Chevalier. However, this is accomplished in a seriously clever fashion. The story is surrounded by water and the author uses the device of a flat stone being skimmed across the surface. If you can do this well (I can’t) then the stone appears to bounce on the water, possibly several times. At each bounce we move forward historically but Venice and it’s neighbouring islands run on its own time. It is indeed a place that can feel frozen in time, it has its own pace. I have never had any difficulty in suspending disbelief, surely in a way that is what fiction is all about. Thus Orsola witnesses war and occupation with Austria, plague that decimates the whole lagoon and the expansion of trade as more areas of the world are discovered by Europe.
Chapter 3 opens thus: ‘ You have skimmed that flat stone well and true across the lagoon’s surface. Another skip and it touches down in 1631. Time alle Veneziana in action once more.’
Many of Orsola’s problems are not so different from those of many women all over the world today and because of this timeless universality she effortlessly slides in time without any awkwardness or difficulty. Orsola cannot marry the man she loves because her family won’t allow it. She has to marry for business reasons but luckily he is a good man who loves her. She is ground down by the drudgery of laundry and cleaning and has to be inventive and creative when she wants to set up a small venture of her own making glass beads. Orsola is strong, resilient, stoic and determined but always puts the rest of her very extended family first. How many women could be described just so?
Tracy Chevalier is a meticulous historical researcher such that her fiction has a ring of truth about it. Apologies if that strikes you as an oxymoron! She has written another beautiful book which is a perfect joy to read. I offer it to you. Out in paperback now. Do indulge.