Towards the end of Tracy Chevalier’s sparkling new book, heroine Orsola Rosso, a Venetian glassmaker, considers the rearing horse figurines her fellow artisans churn out for tourists. “Why reach for the familiar?” she chides, before acknowledging that she, too, is occasionally guilty of replicating old work rather than creating something wholly fresh. “More and more this was the case as she grew older and more jaded.”
It’s not inconceivable that Chevalier herself, now in her 60s, might have experienced similar misgivings. Certainly, it would account for an altogether unexpected element to this, her 11th novel. The Glassmaker shares much with its predecessors, whose crafty female protagonists – among them embroiders and quilt makers, weavers and printers – are called upon to wrestle with societal constraints at various points in history, from the Dutch golden age to 19th-century Ohio. Like a glass marble’s cats-eye of colour, however, it features a significant twist.
The story starts in 1486, when dark-haired Orsola is just 17, with “arched eyebrows and an air of impatience, as if waiting for something to happen”. By the time it ends centuries later, circa the present day, much has indeed happened, yet Orsola is still only in her late 60s, and those she cares for have, by and large, been similarly slow to age.
Chevalier tethers this fantastical conceit of “time alla Veneziana”, as she calls it, to the metaphor of a skimming stone, angled out over the waters of the Venetian lagoon to the famed glassmaking island of Murano, home to the Rosso family and their workshop. It’s there that Orsola’s father dies in a gruesome accident, pitching the business into uncertainty as her volatile brother, Marco, takes over.
To help make ends meet, Orsola learns bead making, mentored by a rare (and real-life) maestra, Maria Barovier. Beads, as Maria explains, “fill the spaces between things […] They don’t get in the way. They are inconsequential, and women can make them because of that”.
Like Chevalier’s skimming stone, the narrative touches down at distinct moments over the course of more than half a millennia – events of local and often global significance, playfully recapped at the start of each section, from the plague years to the Age of Enlightenment (“Literature: the modern novel has been born. Celebrations!”), the Great War to Covid. As the entwined economic fortunes of the City of Water and the Island of Glass rise and fall, there are vibrant cameos for Casanova and socialite Luisa Casati, while fictional characters, including an enslaved gondolier, illuminate lesser-known facets of Venice’s history.
As for Orsola, she will experience love – a defining heartbreak, too – marriage and motherhood but it’s her beads that will sustain her. The work that Marco dismisses as escrementi di coniglio (rabbit droppings) allows her to express her creativity, forge lasting alliances beyond her class and experience unprecedented agency. She is even commissioned to make a necklace for the empress Josephine.
Chevalier admits in her acknowledgments that it took multiple rewrites to make the book’s successive time shifts work. They might easily have felt gimmicky. Instead, she uses them to highlight not just change but all that remains the same. And so Venice is a place whose essential character somehow endures, despite its loss of position as the world’s trading hub, despite mass tourism, rising sea levels and floods. Likewise, Orsola, whose lot as a woman alters powerfully as the eras fly by, remains at heart her nimble, determined self, even if she now has a mobile in her hand and feels, finally, older.
Will Chevalier’s readers find familiar elements here? Yes, but they seem less a failure of creativity than a triumph of craft. The sparing intensity to her scene-setting, her vital lightness of touch, her ability to show that historical fiction, at its strongest, always tells a story of the present as well as the past – these are qualities born of the kind of painstaking practice that requires not just talent but something every bit as amorphous as molten glass: time.
The Glassmaker by Tracy Chevalier is published by the Borough Press (£20). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
