Review: Vivien Horler
The Glass Maker, by Tracy Chevalier (The Borough Press)
Sometimes you can judge a book by its cover, and this is one of them.
The cover is alluring, with the delicate blues and greens and pinks of glass baubles or beads. And that is fitting, since this book is a lot, but not entirely, about glass beads.
The Glass Maker is another historical novel from the author of Girl with a Pearl Earring, once again putting a woman front and centre of her tale.
Orsola Rossi is a member of a Murani glass family who defies tradition and becomes that rare creature, a female glass maker. Her preferred product is glass beads, which can be made at the kitchen table rather than in the workshop.
My Murano beads
Tracy Chevalier has played around with timeframes, starting her tale in 1486, when Venice is the trade centre of Europe and Orsola is a child, and it ends in 2019, when Orsola is in her 60s. Chevalier likens her time-scrunching to someone skipping a stone across a flat lagoon, and says the City of Water runs by its own clock.
This may sound odd, but skilled novelist that she is, she makes it work. She says she had help, however. In her acknowledgements she says storytelling is a delicate balance between clarity and mystery.
“When you mess around with time as I have here, things can go a little wobbly. That is where editors are gold.” And she says to her editors: “This novel would have been a disaster without you.”
Well, it isn’t a disaster. In fact I think it may be even better than Girl with a Pearl Earring. But it may have helped my appreciation that I have visited both Venice and Murano, and have several gorgeous Murano glass necklaces.
A lot happened to Venice and Murano between the years 1486 and 2019, and the Rosso have their ups and downs, along with their beloved islands. Venice was the centre of the world at the time the story begins, suffered through floods and plagues, wars and recessions – the time the city was occupied by the Austrians during Napoleon’s reign was particularly tough. Today its overwhelming popularity with tourists is another challenge.
When the novel opens gondolas are the only form of transport around and between the islands, and by the end the gondolas are used only by tourists.
We learn much of the history of Venice and Murano. In 1291, before our story begins, Venetian authorities feared a carelessly tended furnace could see the entire city burn down, and banished the glassmakers to the island of Murano. It also meant the keeping of trade secrets could be enforced. This becomes one of the novel’s strands when Marco, Orsola’s older brother and destined to become the maestro of the family business, gets drunk, loses a bet, and is forced to take on a fisherman’s son as an apprentice.
Antonio becomes a skilled glassmaker, but when he realises he will never be the maestro, he flees Murano for terraferma – the mainland – eventually taking his skills to Prague. Much later, when Venice’s fortunes are flagging, it is acknowledged one of the reasons is that Czech glassmakers are undercutting them.
The Rossos are a made-up family, but there are several references to the Barovier family, who existed, one of whose members was Maria Barovier, a glass maker in her own right in the 1400s, who invented the prized rosetta bead. In the story she gives Orsola her initial inspiration as a glassmaker.
There are many strands in this novel, the history and geography of watery Venice, Orsola’s two loves, the demands of her family, the centuries-long tension between her and Marco, and how the family copes with success and failure, plague and grief.
But the main strand is glass and the business of glass, how it is maded and sold, its delicacy and toughness, its potential for disaster, its pliability and brittleness, and its beauty.
Chevalier has clearly done a huge amount of research, but what we read is always in the service of the story, which I found utterly beguiling.
If you’ve never been to Venice and Murano, you will enjoy this novel too – with the added understanding of how to tread lightly when you eventually visit the glorious City of Water.
I loved The Glassmaker.
- The Glassmaker is in Exclusive Books’s Christmas catalogue.
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