A lyrical, beautifully-written novel, House of Glass pays tribute to the ‘isolated country house’ gothic while bringing refreshing new things to the genre as well.
Clara Waterfield suffers from osteogenesis imperfecta, or brittle bone disease. Though she has led a sheltered, confined life in a house of padded furniture and rounded edges, Clara’s entire existence has been consumed by bones bruised and broken by the slightest pressure, and long intervals spent in bed, trapped in the fog of opium. When Clara loses her beloved mother on the eve of the First World War, she begins to venture out into the world that has been denied her for so long and finds solace in the gardens at Kew, where, uncaring of the many bruises that her new experiences give her, she discovers a new passion for hothouse plants and botany. Clara’s knowledge and talent lead one of Kew’s gardeners to recommend her to Mr. Fox, a rich gentleman with a country estate and an empty conservatory. When Clara arrives at Shadowbrook House, charged with making the conservatory the envy of the county, she finds that her new employer owns magnificent gardens that are maintained by a staff of ten, but is also a recluse who alternates between never being at home or never leaving his bedroom. Why does Mr Fox seek to cultivate gardens that he never visits? Why is the entire first floor out of bounds? And why will no one discuss the mysterious footsteps that Clara hears above her head at night?
At first glance, it may seem like House of Glass can’t make up its mind whether it wants to be Jane Eyre or The Secret Garden, but this is very far from the truth. At the beginning of the book, it certainly looks like things are headed that way, but when Clara begins work on the conservatory, House of Glass reveals itself to be a very different animal from Brontë or Hodgson Burnett. Fletcher does outstanding, original work with her protagonist and treats her as a human being rather than a token. Constantly bruised, often in pain and incapable of interpreting the consideration of others as anything other than condescension, Clara is grumpy, snappish and constantly ill-mannered. Fletcher never presents these qualities as being anything other than natural aspects of Clara’s personality, thus placing her heroine into the new canon of unlikeable female protagonists who, like limitless numbers of male characters before them, are finally being respected and loved despite their evident unlovability. Fletcher does, regrettably, fall into the trap of imbuing period feminists with modern feminist rage and vocabulary at the expense of subtlety, something that could easily have been avoided by reading Sarah Perry or Sarah Waters. Was it really necessary for Clara to go in ‘why do men think women don’t matter’ guns blazing five seconds after meeting poor Matthew, who was, after all, simply hanging about in a graveyard minding his own business? Could Fletcher not think of a better way to describe Mrs Bale than as a ‘strong woman’, when she has spent most of the book conforming to the sentiment that a female protagonist does not need to be ‘strong’ to be memorable, or indeed, to be a feminist? It seems like a rookie mistake, but is fortunately not so overwhelming as to override Clara’s significance as a character.
Susan Fletcher has a majestic writing style, and spins a vivid, cinematic tapestry of the world of Shadowbrook, whether describing the beauty of the gardens, or Clara’s safe skepticism melting away at the sound of footsteps in rooms she knows are empty. Fletcher masterfully conveys the dreadful sense of anticipation and the heightened sensory awareness that come from standing in a deserted room, or from returning to a room that one left that very morning, to find it disturbed. In the comparisons that Clara draws between other characters and the plants she tends, Fletcher treats the botanical theme with both subtlety and originality, and demonstrates how Clara sees the world through the prism of botany, her shield. Fletcher’s treatment of the importance placed on female reputation and chastity is hauntingly visceral, focusing as it does on the cruelties visited upon women by other women rather than by men. It’s a strikingly modern theme, but also a profoundly old one; these sticks that women beat each other with.
House of Glass is not perfect, however, and this is the fault of the editors rather than the author. Many of this book’s weaker points could have been solved with stricter, more hands-on editing and Fletcher should take her editors over her knee right now for six with the birch. Or rather, five.
Count 1: Allowing Fletcher to take fifty-odd pages to wrap up after the climax, most of them dedicated to listing too much new information.
Count 2: Permitting comma-splice errors outside a stream-of-consciousness narrative.
Count 3: Allowing Fletcher to call this novel House of Glass.
In the course of writing this review, I have found myself accidentally typing both House of Silk and House of Leaves instead of House of Glass. There are too many ‘House of [insert random thing here]s’ in the world: The House of Mirth, House of Flying Daggers, The House of Black and White, House of the Rising Sun, House of Sand and Fog. ‘House of’ is a tired title: why not call a book something new?
Count 4: Permitting too many big reveals.
An audience cannot be expected to handle more than – let’s say two – big reveals at the end of a novel, or the work becomes less like a Chinese puzzle box, and more like a competition to see how far the reader’s patience can be stretched. The last time I encountered so many big reveals on the same scale of House of Glass was in the otherwise excellent The Glass of Time, when so many characters turned out to be the long-lost this or the long-lost that or actually this person or that person all along that I found the level of credulity expected of the reader to be rather gratuitous. House of Glass suffers from a similar problem. A few secrets are good. Too many become tiresome.
Count 5: Allowing a ‘reason for all this’ that is weak.
There are some great novels in which an author is so eager to ‘tell us why’ that the book’s foundations start to crumble. A case in point is The Historian, an absolutely perfect book…until it is revealed that Dracula is murdering and terrorising people because he wants someone to organise his library. Really? House of Glass’ ‘reason for all this’ is not as narratively weak as The Historian‘s, but it still fails to be entirely convincing. Perhaps a leaf should have been taken out of Shirley Jackson’s book: sometimes, the reader really doesn’t need to know why.
House of Glass is an enjoyable read and a refreshing take on the traditional gothic novel. It has its faults, but these are amply redeemed by the gorgeous writing and a truly compelling protagonist.
LADYGILRAEN 