The Marvels

The novel is structured in three parts. Part One unfolds entirely through pencil illustrations, newspaper clippings, letters, and playbills, tracing five generations of the Marvel family, a dynasty of actors connected to London's Royal Theatre from 1766 to 1900. Part Two shifts to prose, following a contemporary boy whose story intersects with the Marvels. Part Three returns to illustrations, offering a glimpse of the future.

Part One opens in 1766 aboard the Kraken, an American ship where the crew stages a play. A boy named Billy Marvel plays a damsel tied to the mast while his older brother Marcus descends from the rigging costumed as an angel. A storm sinks the ship; Marcus dies on shore, leaving 12-year-old Billy and his dog Tar as the sole survivors. Billy arrives in London, where an artist paints a mural of an angel on the Royal Theatre's domed ceiling in Marcus's memory. Billy grows up at the theatre and raises a foundling baby he names Marcus. Successive generations become celebrated actors: Marcus marries actress Catherine Vine and fathers Alexander, a brilliant but violent performer; Alexander's unwanted son Oberon becomes even greater; Oberon marries Eleanora, and together they star in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale. In 1888 they have a red-haired son named Leontes, called Leo. Unlike his forebears, Leo hates acting and loves to draw. His father banishes him from the stage. In January 1900, Leo writes a farewell letter and heads to the docks, but sees an orange glow and races back to find the Royal Theatre engulfed in flames. His fate is left unresolved.

Part Two opens on a snowy night just after Christmas as 13-year-old Joseph Jervis arrives alone in London, having run away from St. Anthony's boarding school in Cornwall. He carries a hand-drawn map to the home of his uncle, Albert Nightingale, at 18 Folgate Street in Spitalfields. Joseph's parents, who relocate frequently, have left him at school over the holidays. His best friend, Blink (whose real name is George Patel), a dark-haired boy with involuntary tics who chose the nickname to show he was unashamed of his condition, was suddenly withdrawn from school two months earlier. Joseph has come hoping Albert can help him find Blink.

After a vagrant burns his map, Joseph encounters Frankie, a neighborhood child who lives near Folgate Street and appears to be a boy, chasing a stray white dog. Frankie guides Joseph toward a golden weather vane shaped like a ship above the rooftops, which leads him to 18 Folgate Street. Through the window, Joseph sees what looks like a preserved 19th-century world: a blazing fire, a chandelier, a black dining table set with half-eaten food, and a portrait of a red-haired man. Albert, a thin, bearded man in a fur coat and purple hat, reluctantly lets Joseph inside but insists the boy cannot stay.

Upstairs, Joseph finds a model ship whose name begins with "Kr" and a leather case containing a photograph of a red-haired boy and a pencil sketch of an angel signed "Leo." He recalls visiting his grandfather in California at age six, where the old man gave him a broken watch frozen at 11:16. After his grandfather's death, Joseph accidentally set a fire trying to recreate that warmth, and his parents sent him to boarding school. He also remembers meeting Blink, who read him a Yeats poem and compared the broken watch to an insect trapped in amber.

Over the following days, Albert grudgingly cares for Joseph while putting him to work cleaning. Joseph notices Albert's ritualistic maintenance of each room: replacing a napkin on the floor, arranging half-eaten food, pouring wine to specific levels, so every space looks as though its inhabitants have just stepped out. He discovers the Latin phrase Aut Visum Aut Non, meaning "You either see it or you don't," inscribed on objects throughout the house.

Frankie breaks in through the attic, and Joseph discovers she is a girl named Frances. She reveals her older brother, Marcus Matthew Bloom, died when she was five, and she recognized his initials on a box in Albert's attic. Frankie tells Joseph that Albert visits her mother Barbara Bloom's clinic, which treats people dying of AIDS. Together they find a hidden cabinet of cassette tapes and an envelope confirming the Marvels lived at 18 Folgate Street. At the Royal Theatre, Joseph watches The Winter's Tale and is struck by the angel on the ceiling, matching Leo's drawing.

Albert threatens to send Joseph away. Joseph flees to Frankie's flat with the tapes. On them, Albert's younger voice narrates the Marvel family saga to an unidentified listener. The tapes recount how a poor factory girl named Mabel Hatch taught herself to read and married a great actor, becoming Eleanora Marvel, and they trace the same generational stories depicted in Part One. The tapes cut off at the 1900 fire. Joseph confronts Albert with his theory that Leo died in the blaze and the grief-stricken parents emigrated to America, becoming the Nightingale family. But the stage door keeper at the theatre, Penney, contradicts everything: The theatre was built in 1821, the angel mural was painted in the 1930s, and Penney personally knew a Billy Marvel, a set designer who died only a few years ago.

Albert reveals the truth: He invented the entire Marvel family saga. He shows Joseph a stack of pencil drawings Billy had made—each picture illustrating a scene from the saga, ending with a blank final page—and explains that the objects are real antiques, but the stories connecting them are his creations. Joseph, devastated, accuses Albert of lying. Albert responds: "No, but they can both be true" (536). He then tells the real story. He grew up in his father's junk shop in the California desert, moved to London, and bought the abandoned house. After catching teenager Marcus Bloom trying to rob him, Albert recognized the boy's talent for woodworking and helped Marcus renovate the house. Albert fell in love with Billy Marvel, a set designer at the Royal Theatre, and Billy moved in. When Marcus was killed in a road accident on his way to a shipbuilding apprenticeship, Albert and Billy channeled their grief into creating the Marvel mythology, encoding their real lives into every detail of the house and its stories. Billy eventually got sick and was treated at Barbara Bloom's clinic. After Billy's death, Albert stopped opening the house. Billy's ashes fill the urn labeled "BELOVED."

Joseph and Albert reconcile on New Year's Eve. Albert promises to help search for Blink and proposes enrolling Joseph at Dragon's Head Academy, Billy's old school. Joseph hosts a dinner party bringing Albert together with Frankie, Barbara, and Frankie's father Harry Bloom. Harry tells Albert he did not cause Marcus's death but saved the boy by giving him purpose. The dinner recreates the scene Joseph first saw through the window, and Joseph realizes his first vision was not a portal to the past but a glimpse of the future.

Joseph thrives at school, but months later Albert's health worsens and Joseph is summoned home. The dining room has been cleared for Albert's sickbed. Joseph turns on a hidden sound system that fills the rooms with recorded voices and birdsong. Albert wakes and mistakes Joseph for Leo. Weeping, Joseph responds: "Yes. It's me. It's Leo" (583). Frankie's stray dog, now caught and still unnamed, leaps onto Albert's bed and gently licks his face, mirroring the story of Tar with the dying Marcus on the beach. Joseph names the dog Tar.

After Albert's death, Joseph's mother, Sylvia Jervis, considers selling the house. Joseph pleads with her not to. Left alone after the funeral, he polishes the dining table on his knees, exactly as Albert did, and resets the room to match the scene he first glimpsed through the window. He retrieves Billy's drawings and turns to the final blank page. Joseph realizes the blank page is Albert's real gift: The story is now his to continue.

Part Three, told through illustrations, shows the house maintained into the future. A postcard from Frankie, dated 2007, is addressed to "Dearest Joe & George" at "The Nightingale House, 18 Folgate Street," revealing that Blink has been found and the house has been saved and renamed. The final images show the house enduring, its candles still burning.