Oscar and Lucinda’s eventual meeting and chaste passion brings them both social disapproval and ecstatic joy. (Don’t even get me started on which part of Dennis Hasset is in question.) The rejected Lucinda flees to London for solace, as Oscar flips a coin to decide whether he should quit England to devote himself to a missionary life in New South Wales. “So,” she said, nodding her head, “there is a part of you that wishes to be sent away?”
Then Hasset’s bishop puts an end to the idyll by banishing him to a miserable pioneer hamlet in the outback, where the parishioners don’t even have a church, and the last pastor was chucked into the Bellingen river. The Reverend Hasset’s goodbyes to Lucinda. He describes himself as “a cold man warming himself at someone else’s fire.” But he cannot imagine himself married to a woman like Lucinda. Hasset is just enough of a rebel to be irresistibly drawn to her. He falls in love with her, even as he disapproves of her behavior, and even as the scandal of their continuing association grows. The Reverend Hasset helps Lucinda in her attempt to realize her mother’s dream by purchasing a glass factory. Lucinda begs him not to destroy it, leaving him puzzled and disgruntled.Ĭaution: Semi-Spoilers Ahead, But I Don’t Give It All Away
There’s a piquant scene where Hasset brings out a Prince Rupert’s drop and a pair of pliers, reveling in the anticipation of the treat. Yet the same drop of glass will burst into a rain of fine powder if its tail is gently clipped. In the form of the oddity known as the Prince Rupert’s drop, glass is impervious to the blow of a sledgehammer. Solid in the moment, time reveals that glass is in fact a changeable liquid. Glass, in all its paradoxical qualities, is the ruling metaphor of the book. Hasset and Lucinda too share a fascination–with the beauty of glass and the mysteries of its manufacture.
The Reverend Hassett and Lucinda examine a lens.
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