Tracy Chevalier and The Glassmaker

Tracy Chevalier does it again with a breathtaking new novel set in everyone's favorite country: Italy.

TL;DR Tracy Chevalier creates a unique framing device to jump through time in her latest novel, The Glassmaker. The novel provides a good example for authors who want to write a story over a long period of time about specific characters but not have to worry about actual time. It’s also an excellent example of an omniscient narrator who doesn’t suffer from head-hopping.

Historical fiction set in Italy

I’m halfway through Chevalier’s historical fiction novel The Glassmaker set in Venice, or Murano actually, where glass has been made for more than 1,000 years.

For the 2024 Wimbledon Book Festival, Chevalier’s didn’t give the standard book talk. No, she gave a fantastic presentation (including slides with photos and videos of Italy!) describing how this book came to be. It’s ‘origin story’ she called it.

A reader first gave her the idea to write about Murano glass in 2011, handing her a stack of books about glassmaking that she didn’t open right away. At a book festival in Mantua in 2015 a reader requested a book set in Italy, and she agreed without stopping to think about it, worrying about her promise only moments after she stepped off the stage.

As Chevalier researched her novel A Single Thread, set in Winchester, England, her husband asked her if she could write a novel in a place they actually wanted to visit. She went home and took those books on glassmaking off the shelf. And so began The Glassmaker.

Sadly the pandemic occurred right at the time she planned her research trip, so she was at first constricted to the UK. Once the world emerged from lockdown, Chevalier and her husband were off, and the novel was born.

Tracy Chevalier speaking about her new book The Glassmaker at Wimbledon Library for Wimbledon Book Festival 2024.

Historical figures within historical fiction

Chevalier outlined how the plot of the novel came to be. She didn’t want her heroine to be a real person: it’s too limiting in scope – people are born, people die – there’s not a lot of flexibility for a novelist.

But real people can appear in a novel, and that’s how she approached it. She made an actual woman glassmaker (an anomaly since it’s always been a male-dominated profession) the mentor to the protagonist – an excellent idea for any historical fiction writer looking to include a particular person in their novel without getting confined by actual history.

One of the most fascinating aspects of the novel is that the characters live for 500 years. They age slowly, the world continuing around them. Every chapter starts with an update of what has occurred in the world since readers last saw them.

Chevalier addressed this in the talk: she wanted to write about glassmaking and how it’s evolved over the centuries, but she didn’t want a family saga; she wanted her readers to be invested in the same characters over that whole period.

If you want to read more, beware of spoilers ahead!

Narrative framework for skipping through time within a novel

To do this, Chevalier had to create a narrative device, a narrative voice, that would allow her to “skip” through time. Her opening lines set up the framework beginning the story in 1486:

“If you skim a flat stone skilfully across water, it will touch down many times, in long or short intervals as it lands. With that image in mind, now replace water with time.”

It’s a beautiful introduction to the narrator who guides the readers through the story, and it’s a good example of how to use an omniscient narrator without any head-hopping.

The first jump through time, from chapter 1 to chapter 2, was somewhat startling. The omniscient narrator zooms back to provide an overview of the events of the past eighty years before slowly narrowing down back to The City of Water, then Murano, then the Island of Glass, and back to the Rosso family home:

“At a table in the corner of the kitchen, Orsola Rosso is turning back and forth in the flame a translucent green bead. She looks up and it is no longer 1494 but 1574. … In this magical place where time passes differently, she and those who are important to her have not grown any older.”

During my first read-through, I thought the first pages of each chapter a little clunky. On my second read-through, I slowed down and enjoyed the beauty of the words. The patient handholding of the humorous narrator, and the magic of a well-written zoom-in is cinematic in effect. Chevalier provides an excellent example for writers looking to start a story with a wide-angle view and slowly focus onto the characters.

Chevalier’s method of time travel is something other writers could adapt if they wanted to do something similar. Chevalier has absolutely broken a rule, but as an experienced writer, she can get away with it; she bends the rules around structure and transitions to carry readers through the centuries to delightful effect, making this a true historical fiction novel spanning 5oo years!

Chevalier, T. The Glassmaker (London, 2024), 3, 68

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