Review: Michael Cox, The Glass of Time
Mystery and Melodrama in Victorian England
It is September 1876, just a few days after Esperanza Gorst’s nineteenth birthday. A successful interview with the 26th Baroness Tansor has led to her appointment as a lady’s maid at the country house of Evenwood, but unbeknownst to her new employer, Esperanza is not what she seems.
The "Great Task"
Equipped with a face impossible to forget and a set of faked references and recommendations, Esperanza is here to fulfil her role in a “Great Task”, a mission so secret that Esperanza herself is ignorant of its true purpose. All she knows is that her guardian Madame de l’Orme, with whom she has been living in France, has sent her over to England to secure the position of lady’s maid to the Baroness and record all that she sees and hears at Evenwood in her Book of Secrets “When I first came to Evenwood, the pages in my Book stood blank; but this, as I soon discovered, was a house of secrets, and the pages quickly began to fill” (Prologue).
The plot soon thickens in a suitably Victorian manner, with the Baroness’s two handsome sons vying for Esperanza’s attention, and the Lady herself alternating between excessive demonstrations of love and anger towards her young maid. Added to this, a series of newspaper clippings sent by Madame de l’Orme concerning the violent death of the Baroness’s husband-to-be some twenty-two years earlier suggest that this killing was perhaps not as clear-cut as at first thought.
Readers of Michael Cox’s first novel, The Meaning of Night, will already be familiar with Emily Carteret, now Lady Tansor, and her murdered fiancé. The second novel works as a stand-alone read, but to read the two books out of order would spoil the tightly plotted suspense of the first. Esperanza herself becomes aware of the true nature of Evenwood only by degrees, as she must wait for the final letter from three sent to her by Madame de L’Orme before she realises how she herself is a vital part of the story.
In the Tradition of Dickens & Collins
Fans of Cox’s debut will be pleased to find that the style of writing – densely worded prose much in the tradition of the Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins whom Miss Gorst so deeply admires – remains unchanged. The book abounds with good-natured clichés familiar to any reader of Victorian fiction: the early-morning mist rising from the grounds of the country house; the unfriendly housekeeper; the simple but likeable housemaid. These only add to the fun of the experience, as underneath it all lies a cracking story in the tradition of Dickens, conceived on a grand-scale and executed with theatrical flourish – it will have you hooked by the end of the first act.
The Glass of Time by Michael Cox is published in the UK by John Murray (2008), 531 pages, ISBN 978-0-7195-9720-6.
cover of Glass of Time
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