What Book to Read?

If you enjoyed Michael Cox’s first book, the sequel is a must.

The Glass of Time (2008) follows on twenty years later from events in The Meaning of Night. There is enough background provided that the book stands alone, but it is probably better to start with the first volume of the saga. The story is again presented as if it were a manuscript edited by a modern scholar. This manuscript is subtitled: The Secret Life of Miss Esperanza Gorst Narrated by Herself, though the editor notes that ‘it is firmly novelistic in character and should be read first and foremost as a work of fiction, or at least a highly fictionalized autobiography’. So the writer is setting himself the task of convincing the reader – who knows the story is fiction – that it could actually be autobiography – and as with the earlier book, Cox succeeds wonderfully well.

This book presents the next instalment of the history of the Duport family, with some of the same characters and some new ones, including Esperanza. The story is less melodramatic than the earlier one – though it still has melodrama – and some readers may find it less exciting. Most of the violence happens off stage, and there is less opportunity for the opium dens and prostitutes of the earlier book; these, after all, are the recollections of a young lady.

The story begins when the young and beautiful orphan Esperanza is sent on a mysterious ‘Great Task’ by her guardian, Madame de l’Orme. This involves her going to Evenwood as a lady’s maid to the Baroness Tansor. Her guardian promises in due course to explain what lies behind this, and gradually reveals to Esperanza – and the reader – how this quest is an extension of Edward Glyver’s attempt in the previous book to re-instate the rightful heir at Evenwood. No prizes for guessing who the rightful heir is, but Cox manages to insert enough tangles and false leads to keep the reader going quite happily. I for one read it compulsively to find out what would happen next.

One of the issues of writing a story as an autobiography is that the voice and circumstances of the narrator dominate it. A major achievement of this novel is that Cox gives the narrator a voice that is totally appropriate to the young Esperanza, and totally different to the voice of Edward Glyver in the previous book. However as he is writing within the conventions of Victorian diary writing, the voice is sometimes a bit mannered, as in the aside: ‘(I had this information from Mr Pocock, the butler, and, as is my habit, wishing always to improve myself and extend my knowledge, wrote it down as soon as I could in one of the note-books I keep constantly about me.)’. This idiom is intentional, but can be annoying. The reader is addressed – as in the opening sentence – in the present tense: ‘I wish you, first of all, to imagine you are standing beside me, peeping over the rail of an arched and curtained gallery …’. But other sections are told, from Esperanza’s point of view, in the past tense. There doesn’t really seem to be a reason for this, and it can be distracting.

As in the earlier book, the story has typically Victorian themes – the importance of blood and heredity, duty and sacrifice, the effects of guilty secrets and a romantic apprehension of life as expressed through poets and poetry. Esperanza loves reading novels, so there is also reference to Victorian writers such as ‘Miss Braddon’ – who’s best known novel Lady Audley’s Secret shares some themes with Cox’s work – and Wilkie Collins. The story uses some of the plot devices found in Collins’s novels, such as the introduction of the police detective, who is clever, but not always right in his deductions.

I also find echoes of other Victorian fiction, particularly that of Dickens, in this story. The Baroness Tansor reminds me strongly of Lady Dedlock from Bleak House in her dedication to a dead lover and her sadness and ennui – the shadow of past failings falling on them both. And the lawyer Mr Vyse, whose Dickensian name is well bestowed, resembles the unpleasant lawyer, Tulkinghorn, from the same story. Other readers may find other similarities. It is to be presumed that Cox is not so much stealing from Victorian novels as making reference in tribute to them, as is the post modern literary convention.

I tend to be picky about the history in historical novels. There is one I can think of where the writer clearly has no idea how much labour it took to run a large country house, and has the same servant quite unrealistically doing everything. (Ask me, and I’ll tell you which book it is.) But Cox seems to do a pretty good job of the upstairs downstairs situation. Esperanza consults Mrs Beeton’s Book of Household Management (1861) to get herself up to speed as a lady’s maid, and seems to manage the role pretty well. From the beginning she is, of course, fairly exceptional for a lady’s maid, so the degree of freedom she has is perhaps reasonable, though in most large houses even the upper servants wouldn’t have had the privileges she enjoys. Oh well. As I said, I’m picky.

But neither this, nor the fact that you can guess the outcome fairly early in the book, in any way spoilt it for me. It is indeed a shame that there won’t be a third in the series.

The book has an interesting website.