Gareth Rubin’s The Turnglass is at least four books in one volume. English majors are going to love digging into all the layers and echoes in these conjoined stories. Rubin writes that he was inspired by tête-bêche books and, even though I read this book in ebook format and so missed the experience of flipping my kindle around for the second story, I did want to go back to the start of the first story so that I could take a another ride.
The first story takes place on a remote Essex coastal island in 1881. Our protagonist for this tale is Dr. Simeon Lee, who has just agreed to become his uncle’s doctor. (He needs the money. He’d much rather be studying cholera.) Things get weird the very first night when the uncle reveals that he is his sister-in-law’s jailor. Florence lives out her days in a glass cell built into the house. (The other option is an insane asylum.) Lee loves a mystery, apparently. He can’t help poking around and asking questions to figure out what Florence actually did and why there’s a two-years-dead body buried in the mud on his uncle’s island. It’s amazing how much plot Rubin crams into this novella.
The second story is set on the other side of the world from Essex and fifty-ish years later. Aspiring actor Ken Kourian becomes swept up in a mystery after befriending a rising author. Oliver Tooke takes Ken under his wing because, unlike so many other people in his life, Ken is a good listener. Compared to Lee, Ken is a fairly passive protagonist. Of course, he doesn’t really need to investigate since everyone around him just blabs out what they know within five minutes. Where the first story is highly Gothic, the second is very much a noir.
A strange book features in each story, one of many connections between the two parts of The Turnglass. These books-inside-of-other-books increased my sense of unreality. Vonnegut would have to use a Klein bottle shape to plot these books. That sense of unreality didn’t stop me from getting absorbed in the stories, thankfully. Instead, their strangeness and out-of-placeness spurred me to think about the importance of how stories are told as I watched Lee and Ken try to figure out what the hell was going on. No one’s word can be trusted. Those who aren’t lying may not have all the facts or may have been told a different version of events. That said, it’s not impossible to solve the mysteries because the distortions and lies are also clues. Like I said, English majors are going to have a blast with The Turnglass.