Book Review: The Turnglass by Gareth Rubin

Anyone who knows my reading preferences knows that I am a sucker for metafiction. I love watching authors play with form to tell a compelling story. For The Turnglass, Gareth Rubin looks back to the past to present a fresh new type of historical murder mystery, set in two different eras and on two different continents. Specifically, he and his publishers resurrect the tete-beche format, where two shorter novels are packaged together in one volume. You read one novel, then flip the book upside down to read the other. In this case, both novels are cleverly intertwined to tell one compelling story. Each part stands on its own, though arguably the story set in 1881 Essex feels more complete unto itself than the one set in 1939 Los Angeles (and for good reason, as you’ll discover while reading this absorbing book!)

The Essex story begins with a young, ambitious London doctor named Simeon Lee. Simeon is in desperate need of funding for his dream of finding a vaccine for cholera. The board to which he applies is less enthusiastic, not because they know that cholera is a bacterial infection that will not be cured by a vaccine, but because they see little value in his research at all:

“Three hundred pounds? For a disease now confined to the slums?” There were murmurings of agreement from the rest of the panel. “It is what those who live in such places are used to. They are born into it. They will live their lives in it.”

 

“And if you spend as much time in their company as I have, you would know that many of them are better off not living in it.”

 

“Your meaning?” the elderly doctor asked. 

 

“My meaning, sir, is that I can’t tell you the number of children younger than five years of age that I have seen who were condemned to nothing more than a short, pain-filled life. At times it has been tempting to cut their lives short then and there rather than watch their inevitable decline.”

 

“Well, that is between you and God. Here, we are concerned with your application for a grant.”

After perhaps inevitably being denied funding, a frustrated Simeon decides to accept a paying job from his wealthy but distant uncle. Oliver Hawes is a rural curate who lives in a curious house that becomes separated from the mainland at every treacherous high tide. Turnglass House, as it’s known, has a reputation for being if not quite cursed, then not quite right either. It doesn’t help that Oliver is currently keeping his own sister-in-law Florence locked in a specially built glass-walled room. She was found guilty of killing her husband, Oliver’s brother, several years ago and was sentenced to house arrest, sparing her the madhouse. 

The trouble is, Oliver is now convinced that Florence is somehow managing to escape her confinement in order to poison him. Simeon has been hired to help him figure out how, and to both cure Oliver and stop Florence. But there is more than one mystery afoot at Turnglass House, not least of which is the strange science-fiction novel Simeon is given, about a glass house built on the coast of California in the 1900s.

The second novel of this book revolves around young Ken Kourian, who came to 1930s Los Angeles from Georgia via Boston to try his luck in the movies. For the most part, his luck has been poor, and he works a low-level job at a newspaper to make ends meet. That changes when he’s invited to a party at the house of the governor’s son, the celebrated author Oliver Tooke. Ken isn’t exactly a country bumpkin, but this strange glass house strikes him as being somehow not right:

The exterior walls were glass, the interior walls were glass. The doors were glass framed by a few splinters of wood. You could walk up from the highway and stare right through it, out to the ocean. Only smoked panes on the upper level prevented you looking right through there too. On top of the house was a weathervane, also made of glass, in the shape of an hourglass. It was twisting in a light breeze like it was pointing the way and the way kept changing. The building was an extraordinary sight, but somehow also wrong, Ken thought. There was just something off about its character.

Despite his initial unease, Ken and Oliver quickly strike up a firm friendship, cemented in part by Oliver’s own ambiguous feelings regarding the Tooke family home. So it’s a shock to Ken when Oliver apparently commits suicide a short while later. At least, that’s what the police are calling it. Ken isn’t so sure. The more he looks into Oliver’s death, the more convinced he is that clues as to what really happened are hidden in Oliver’s final book, a tete-beche novel called The Turnglass, whose hero is a doctor named Simeon Lee.

In addition to being a clever use of format in which to seed clues and unravel the truth, this is a terrific examination of old shibboleths that still have uncomfortable relevance for readers today. The Turnglass as a whole confronts readers with the many ways in which injustice – whether it be via patriarchy, classism, or eugenics – has manifested throughout history, cloaking itself in a pretense of caring for the disadvantaged while ruthlessly enriching itself via their exploitation. Now more than ever, we need intelligent, inventive books like this one to not only entertain us but to remind us that empathy and a refusal to accept convenient lies as truth are both integral components in the process of building a just and better world.