The Glassmaker, by Tracy Chevalier

Tracy Chevalier's new novel is set in Venice, and it's about a glassmaker named Orsola. The author - perhaps best known for Girl With A Pearl Earring, inspired by Vermeer's famous picture - does very strange things with time in this novel. I'm still not entirely sure that this aspect of it works for me: I felt mildly irritated by it as I read the book - until I reached the end, when it suddenly came together triumphantly, and I almost burst out clapping.

What she does is this. The book starts in 1486 with nine year-old Orsola Rosso, the daughter of a glassmaking family on the island of Murano. It ends in 2020, with the Covid epidemic. At this time, Orsola is sixty five. The premise is that time flows differently in Venice, so that Orsola and her family and associates live somehow outside the passage of time on Terrafirma - the world that is not Venice. This enables the author to encompass centuries of Venetian history, as she takes up Orsola's life at various key points.

As a girl, Orsola is not expected to work in the family business. But when her father dies in a tragic accident, and the business, under the direction of her brother Marco, starts to go downhill, she is determined to do something to help. She learns how to make beads - and then she goes to Venice to persuade the merchant who handles the family's exports to sell them for her. On her trip she meets Antonio, a handsome young man who wants to learn glassblowing, and his friend Domenego, a Black gondolier who is a slave. These two become important threads in her life.

At this point, Venice is a powerful trading nation. But things change, as they always do, and time moves on - though not for Orsola and her circle. She experiences the plague, the advent of Napoleon, the wars of the twentieth century, and then the Covid epidemic of the twenty first. So it goes, until that very clever, satisfying ending.

I'm still not sure about the timing device, though it certainly enables the author to convey the sweep of more than 500 years of Venetian history. But quite apart from that, the writing is beautiful; the descriptions of Venice and particularly of the glassmaking process are extraordinary. It's clear from the novel itself that Tracy Chevalier did a vast amount of research for it, and this is confirmed in her note at the end. And the portrayals of Orsola, her family and friends, are vivid and engaging - we come to care about them. In the end, a very satisfying read.