Never in a novel has the medium of glass been portrayed so beautifully and appropriately to signify humanity’s stubborn strength and utmost fragility. It is portrayed best perhaps by the shape of the Prince Rupert’s drop — a serpent-shaped glass which heaves at the tip, when hammered by extraordinary force will be able to withstand it. Yet the other end is a different story:
For although it is strong enough to withstand the sledgehammer, the tail can be nipped with a pair of blunt-nosed pliers.It takes a little effort. And once it is done it is as if you have taken out the keystone, removed the linchpin and kicked the foundations. The whole thing explodes.
Prince Rupert tears are also created often by accident, a simple turn of fate. We are opaque, distorted, yet transparent. Our virtues may cut, endure all sorts of pressure, until it can’t. Our flaw is that we collapse, and we collapse all at once.
The premise for Oscar and Lucinda is magnetic to begin with — a gambling priest at the time of Australia’s early settlement, when the smell of Sydney is the smell of the quagmire, meeting an orphaned heiress who’s obsessed with glass and complimenting him, a terribly compulsive gambler. These two are our title characters, and it is narrated by an ambiguous narrator, the great-grandson of Oscar, the jaded Anglican priest who at a whim would fall into bets which can shape the turns and skews of his life. It is told a few generations forward, and we can assume of the story’s ending. Or you would assume. But you’d be dead wrong.
The obsessive gambler meets the compulsive gambler
It all started with a Christmas pudding in a small town English village for Oscar. Motherless, he had to abide by his fire and brimstone preacher father who does not believe in the delicacies of life. When the servants served Oscar a pudding, his father smashed his head that he spat the pudding right out of his mouth. By chance he started gambling with his own fate, searching for signs from God, which led him to leave his home for the Anglican preacher next door, determined that this is his calling — to be an Anglican preacher. Though the Anglicans are pretty broke, they made do with Oscar in the household and the Anglican preacher and his wife, the Strattons become his adopted parents.
Lucinda, on the contrary, was already an Australian resident at this time, before Australia was even a word. When her parents abruptly died, she was left under the care of Mr Ahearn, and under the will of her mother managed to sell the land she was living in for a fortune. Her calling was for glass, as she was obsessed with the concept of the Crystal Palace as a child. Her first step in her vocation was to purchase the glassworks factory, but letting others to manage them. She tried moving to England for a while, her mother country, even met with George Eliot (yep, that one) to their mutual disdain, decided that it wasn’t really for her, and sailed back to Australia where she met Oscar in the voyage back, who was being called to terra australis either by fate or a toss of a coin. Though they make an uncommon pair, they share a love for gambling, which eventually leads to Oscar’s downfall.
When Lucinda was discovered in Oscar’s residence by a couple of parishioners, the scandal costed Oscar his priest collar. After having been found by Lucinda, he became her lodger. She even got him a job as a clerk, though it is something that he hated. Circumstances lead them to wager a bet on Lucinda’s inheritance — that Oscar was able to create a glass church in an outer part of Sydney, rarely ventured.
Weathering the glass, battering against the panes of the crystal palace
My goodness, like the Crystal Palace sketched on the cover of my edition, this book is extraordinarily beautiful. Though only compulsive in gambling, Lucinda had always been obsessed with beauty. When she revealed her prototype glass structure to Oscar, not knowing the use for it, and its quality, we were also elated. I was elated to a high — pages like these is the reason I read. Oscar, mesmerised by the prototype:
He saw glass as those who love it perceive it. He understood that it was the gross material most nearly like the soul, or spirit (or how he would wish the soul or spirit to be), that it was free from imperfection, of dust, rust, that it was an avenue for glory.
A metaphor for the human spirit, glass is as beautiful as it is fragile, easily misconstrued, but a vehicle for greatness nonetheless. And it is with this same material that Oscar and Lucinda wager their bet — the difficulty of transporting glass from the harbours of Sydney to the middle of the bush parallel our own journeys of carrying our own spirits to our final destination intact.
It is also a book of misunderstandings which may cost us well, a helluva lot. Mixed signals and whole conversations can happen in the minds of our characters, and it could be an entirely wrong conversation. Oscar mistook Lucinda’s motives and love interests, but he loved her enough to satisfy her fancies to the point that he wagers the transportation of a crystal church. In their initial meeting en route to Australia, what Lucinda perceived as rudeness for leaving without saying goodbye was actually caused by Oscar’s phobia of water, thus prompting him to stay below deck while the other members of the party rushed aboard. Consequently, Lucinda did not bother to follow through on improving her acquaintance with Oscar until much later. Oscar’s father’s roughness to his son is for his best interest, but like many men, is unable to profess his true emotions to his son. Oscar and Lucinda is about these nuances in our failure to connect, and the misunderstandings bearing fruit of these failures.
Oscar and Lucinda also explores human folly, those caprices which we find irresistible and feel like nothing at first, but with the effect of the flap of the butterfly wings will echo later on. While misunderstandings may be unintentional, those grasped by their folly are full aware of their actions with little regard to what follows. Oscar and Lucinda’s gambling impulses tarnish their otherwise steadfast characters, yet this folly is necessary in their characters. It drives Oscar to his financial success and being able to support his own living as an Anglican minister (more or less), and led Lucinda to the purchase of the glassworks. The strength of character and weakness of vice are two sides of the same coin, and at times feed off each other. Praise folly, spite folly.
The book is also a wonderful fragment of memory of early Australia — rough, like a Henry Lawson poem, fraught with hazards such as the combative nature of its natives and the unmapped territory. The young Australia is relentless, merciless ground for its voyagers. This is a place where unguarded young carpenters are buggered by other men, men commit murder and get away with it, the grounds are muddy and the men’s heads even more so. It is also a place full of promise. The migration of the English settlers to Australia, who are not convicts often come with their own unique reasons — whether it is for the sake of forwarding biology or putting their own names over mountain ranges. Its unmapped territories are punishing, difficult, but ultimately rewarding for those who make it.
As the broken down and battered crystal church sunk in the river is beautiful, the prose in Oscar and Lucinda is just as sublime. Peter Carey is a technical writer, but one who is able to balance the whimsicality of writing with solid intent. Oscar and Lucinda is heavy with symbolism with poetic yet lucid sentences which will make you reread some of these sentences over and over again, and a voice which may be moderately difficult at times, but necessary for the construct of its beauty. It is a process as delicate as glass-blowing, for a novel equivalent to the beauty and vulnerability of the crystal palaces of our minds.
