The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier review: 'a very clever novel'

Tracy Chevalier

Time in Venice moves differently from time elsewhere, very differently in Tracy Chevalier's engaging new novel. In her first sentence, after a prefatory note about Venetian Time, she writes about a stone skimming across water, with moments in the air before it touches water again, and then again, if you are a skeely skimmer, as indeed she shows herself to be.

So in one sense she presents us with an episodic history of Venice, and especially of the glassmakers on the island of Murano, from 1486 - when Venice is the trade centre of Europe, its glassmakers supreme - to 2019, when the city is emptying itself of Venetians, gondolas are for tourists and huge tourist yachts invade the lagoon.

But - and here is Chevalier's audacity - while the episodes are dated according to our conventional manner, the Rossa family of glassmakers, their business agents and acquaintances, age differently, perhaps a dozen or 15 years in century. So the heroine, Orsola, glassmaker's daughter and herself to become a maker of beautiful glass beads, is nine in when we first meet her, but still only 65 more than 500 years later. This may seem tiresomely tricky, affected even. That indeed was my first thought. Yet what matters in fiction is what works, and here it all works very well indeed.  

Each of the long sections takes the family story and the history of Venice and its economic shifts skimming onwards, and, while the slow-ageing characters will eventually die, they will not do so as quickly as people do away from Venice. I might also say that here, unlike in conventional family sagas which sweep over the centuries, one doesn't have to acquaint oneself with a completely new set of characters  again and again. This is very comforting.

There is, of course, a great deal about the art and craft of glassmaking, and about the glass beads which even women are permitted to make. This is interesting and some will find it enthralling, but in essence this is an extended family saga, well done and enjoyable.

The theme of the different sections is nicely varied. There is a truly chilling account of a year when the plague reached first Venice and then Murano, victims being banished by the sinister plague doctors to asylums where they mostly died miserably, their families being confined to strict quarantine. But there are lighter episodes, too, one featuring that engaging scoundrel Casanova - how could the author have resisted? - and another dealing with Napoleon's wife, Josephine.

The history of the Rosso family - a rich array of characters joined by blood, disturbed by rivalries, reluctant for centuries to accept incomers, who by the end will be ordering things - runs in parallel with the slow, prolonged decline of Venice. In truth, even as the city seems to stand supreme and majestic when the novel begins, its supremacy was already being eroded as Europe looked west and other merchants rounded the Cape of Good Hope to trade with India and what is now Indonesia. It would take, as we see here, a long time for Venice to accept that it had lost its primacy.

This is a truly remarkable and richly enjoyable novel. I began it with some misgivings, not least because the structure threatened to be self-indulgent and whimsical. That fear was unfounded, however. Once you accept the premise that the Rossa family and those they know and deal with live in a different time from the world beyond Venice (though they are inevitably made aware of the world beyond the lagoons) everything holds together. It is a very clever novel, but wholly free from the self-satisfaction evident in so many clever novels, It's fantastic, but yet rooted in reality - and there is sadness, of course, because it is a family story and true to life, and because Venice is now so melancholy a place.

The Glass Maker, by Tracy Chevalier, The Borough Press, £20