The Reading Group Reads
THE MYSTERIES OF GLASS by Sue Gee
IT IS JUST BEFORE CHRISTMAS in 1860. Richard Allen, newly ordained, arrives at
a railway station in the Herefordshire countryside. The engine belches steam,
it is bitterly cold, the first stars are coming out. The crossing keeper lights
the way to his cottage with a lantern.
Richard has come to take up his first curacy. His father had been a priest and Richard finds he slips naturally into his father's ways, taking immense pains with his sermons, coping easily with parish small talk, making friends. But he falls in love with his rector's wife, Susannah, and she with him. He has begun to betray his calling and his faith is shaken. Was he turning towards a world without light? "How did solid earth become translucent glass?"
The countryside is a powerful presence in this book, magical in all its seasons - a countryside in those days still whole and unfettered, not the diminished natural world we know today. Some of us felt this was so beautifully evoked, that we could have done without the love story.
But the book is not only about two lovers in 19th century England and the mystery of faith; it is also about the rigidity of Victorian codes of behaviour for men and women. Cruelty could be hidden behind a male facade of upstanding virtue, one who poses as a pillar of the church and of society. Richard stumbles across such a man and makes an enemy. So the answer was "...through purification by fire".
I had been afraid as I read the book that it might end with a whimper; but it didn't - it went out in a blaze of anger and with an idea for service in a different field. The Reading Group meets again on Wednesday, 5 April at 8 p.m. at Janet Cooper's, 41 High Street, when we will be discussing The Harmony Silk Factory by Tash Aw.