Published: 2018
Pages:464
Little is presented as the autobiography of Madame Tussaud. It starts with her birth in Alsace in 1761 and ends 88 years later when she’s approaching death. It’s illustrated by drawings in the style of those on the front cover. They are, frankly, very creepy and they go with the story very well.
Carey based his story on Madame Tussaud’s memoirs, but says they were vague, with many gaps. He has filled in the gaps. Marie Grosholtz, as she is for most of the novel, moves to Paris as a child with her mother’s employer, a doctor who makes anatomical wax models. Marie learns from him and they cast heads of famous people. During the Revolution they make death masks of people who have been guillotined. After the Revolution Marie marries then leaves her husband to display her wax figures in London. The rest, as they say, is history.
No one in the novel is normal. Marie, who has been taught to observe by the doctor, notices every oddity in appearance and behaviour, and there are many of these. Their landlady, the widow of a tailor, keeps her late husband’s mannequin and dresses it in his clothes. Her colourless son is terrified of everything and barely speaks. The house is protected by a child of the streets who later goes on to become one of the (probably apocryphal) greatest killers of the Revolution. Her world is little more than the Chamber of Horrors for which Madame Tussauds became famous.
It’s a long novel and it drew me in from the beginning. When the Revolution arrives, there’s a fair amount of blood and gore, so it’s not for the faint-hearted. I enjoyed it very much.
April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.
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