Tulips. Longitude. Spices. A fashion in book-making has come upon us. You take a hitherto little considered, even on the face of it banal, subject and you narrate, analyse, historically contextualise, morally parse and culturally locate the hell out of it. No resonance goes untested.
This is one of those, and for anybody with a lively curiosity about the impedimenta of the world around them, it is perfectly readable and engaging. But only up to a point, Lord Copper (one of the materials, incidentally, from which early mirrors were made). There was much of the alchemical about the first processes. Medieval mirrors of polished steel were cast by a handful of craftsmen who knew to exploit the accidental art of a little furnace carbon mixing with the pig iron they were smelting. And the arcane ingredients of their fine-quality glass were jealously, though ultimately unsuccessfully, guarded by a small freemasonry on the Venetian island of Murano.
The Venetian masters blew orbs and cut concave or convex discs from them, to be silver-backed for mirrors. It was the French who developed the technique of casting glass, flat and yielding much larger pieces. So greatly prized were these items that Louis XIV's finance minister, Colbert, established the Royal Glass and Mirror Company, a "nationalised" under taking, at St Gobain and set about luring craftsmen from the Republic of Venice to Paris in a transnational conspiracy of ambassadors and agents and death threats that could readily be moulded into a period spy yarn. Ms Melchior-Bonnet's research is formidable; scarcely a written source for several centuries is left unplundered, from Pliny to Diderot, Baudelaire to Barthes. Most references are French, with just one contribution by the English, even though from the 17th century mirror-makers were as active in London as in Paris. So this, then, is a very Gallic book (even having the edges of its pages roughcut, like the literary paperbacks of Flammarion and Gallimard). The other heroine of the enterprise is Dr Katharine H. Jewett, who translated what must be extremely dense French prose into literate, and presumably comprehending, English. Good enough for her, because as they soldiered beyond the first part of the book the eyes of one philosophe manque, at least, began to glaze over, as the author proceeded from the narrative to the anthropological, cultural, even moral, dimensions of what the late Ms Mitford would have us call a looking-glass. "The simplicity of the real vanished before the multiplicity of the artificial". Now that, one can relate to. In the time of the Sun King, when Colbert utilised the new Hall of Mirrors at Versailles as a promotional tool for the St Gobain works, people entering the hall for the first time were disorientated by the way the mirrors on the walls, casemented, reflected the real windows and what was beyond them, and thus became windows themselves.
And one can accept how, towards the end of the 18th century, "the harnessing of the reflection and the rise of a specular consciousness together created a new desire, and at least a new sensibility, a cult of form, that of the aesthete" and the dandy.
But sample this as a digestif: "The structure of the other, as other, is erased, or rather assimilated". And then try to masticate this: "Deprived of its cognitive worth the defective reflection does not cease to refer to a reflexive mechanism and affirms the value of all thought that imagines itself." I seem to sense the grandes ecoles here, and that French tradition of intellectual rigour which churns out the kind of standup philosophers, usually young, male and photogenic, that the French adore, publicise and lionise - and the rest of us Derrida (excuse me, deride) for their compulsive arid dissections and sterile abstractions.
Godfrey Fitzsimons is an Irish Times journalist