The Glass Room [Paperback]

The Glass Room refers to the dramatic living area of a modernist house built on a hill-side in Czechoslovakia in the 1930s. Its architect was commissioned by Victor Landauer and his wife Liesel, with a brief to design a house made of glass and steel, devoid of ornamentation or unnecessary decoration, a house fit for a stylish couple, owners of the Landauer company, makers of luxury motor-cars.

The house is built and lives up to expectations, the young couple receiving guests in the glass room, with its onyx walls and its breathtaking views. Victor and Leisel are wealthy and thoroughly modern couple and their new house matches their style perfectly, "living inside a work of art is an experience of sublime delight - the tranquillity of the large living room and the intimacy of the smaller rooms . . . the most remarkable experience of modern living".

Simon Mawer follows the history of the house over the next 50 years, but of course the Landauer family and their friends are the main point of the story. Is it possible to tell the story of a family without also recalling the places in which they live? We build our homes as an expression of ourselves and our memories are often centred on the sense of place as much as on those who inhabit those spaces. Leisel Landauer has her great friend and confidante, the stylish and erratic Hanna. Her husband has another friend who come to play a large part in both their lives. Children are born and grow and find that the house has a place in their lives too, although perhaps retrospectively.

Beginning in the 1930s in Czechoslovakia, Mawer's story is of course about the war and its aftermath. Victor Landauer is Jewish, and after the Germans take over the Sudetenland, the family flee to Switzerland, leaving Hanna and other friends to watch the house fall into German hands to be used as a laboratory. The story follows Hanna and her attempts to survive under a hostile regime. Meanwhile in Switzerland the Landauers plot their escape out of Europe across the Atlantic and we read of their only partially successful attempts to keep their household together.

Mawer does not leave us wondering about the fate of his characters. We follow the progress of the house under Soviet rule and later under the new Czcechoslovak state, and in these "flash-forwards" we get glimpses of the lives lived by the Landauers and their friends.

These are the bones of the story, but it is impossible to say more without ruining it for other readers. What is special about the book is Mawer's great gifts for character development and his depictions of the terrible human conflicts brought on a family in such unstable times. This is a book about the divisions inflicted on Europe in the 1930s and their tragic consequences. All the characters are marked by their times and some barely recover. And yet there are passages of lyrical brightness and cathartic resolutions of thirty year old losses which made this reader at least sigh with thankfulness.

I recently read Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks, the story of another industrial dynastic family, and was struck by the similarities between the two books. Really, Simon Mawer has achieved something not much less that Mann's classic masterpiece and I can only congratulate him on his achievement. I am particularly impressed by his research, including a significant amount of linguistic background around the Czech language and its relationship to German. I do hope that The Glass Room is a serious consideration this year's Booker Prize - it is certainly well within that league.

This is a another first rate novel by Simon Mawer. The central protaganists are the Czech/Jewish industrialist Landauers, who are traced from their courtship and marriage to their exile from the Nazis through Switzerland to the United States. But the real hero of the book is the Glass Room (Raum - not exactly the same thing in German or for that matter in Czech or in Russian as is noted in the novel) itself, a fictional version of Mies Van der Rohe's Tugendhat (the architect makes his own appearance as Rainier Von Abt), which the urbane Viktor builds as a marital home for his almost adventurous wife, Liesel. The house - though house is not quite the right word either - metamorphosizes several times over the century, from rich man's showpiece, to nazi biometric research centre to postwar physiotherapy dance studio to communist museum to symbol of the Prague Spring. The house - given some imaginative substance by a series of prints spaced throughout - is far more than a building: it acts as a mirror for the great themes of the twentieth century . It is also the venue for a lot of forbidden sex, its transparency perhaps suggesting a riskseeking desire to be discovered. The waves of history and of eroticsm flood together in this glass room, the one, perhaps, making the other bearable.

The plot depends a fair bit on coincidence - the appearance of Kata, Viktor's part-time mistress from Vienna, as a refugee in Mesto and her subsequent transition to becoming his children's nanny, for example. However, the pace of the story, the excellence of the prose and the ever present mixture of evil, hope and eroticism, and the great lighthouse beam reflection of the glass room itself more than compensate.

The author tells us in a Note at the beginning of this novel that the beautiful modern house that contains the Glass Room is not fictional. Here called the Landauer House in Mesto, it is in fact the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, completed in 1930; and, excellent and faithful though the descriptions of it are, some readers may like to look at Google Images to see what the exterior and the interior actually looked like. They can also ascertain that the real name of the architect, here called Rainer von Abt, was Mies van der Rohe, and the real owners of the house were Fritz Tugendhat (a textile magnate) and his wife Greta, who were BOTH Jewish: in the novel only the husband (Viktor) is Jewish, his wife (Liesel) is not. Well, we have been told in the Note that most of the characters in the novel are fictional, but that some of them are not. So, for instance, one member of Victor's circle is the armaments manufacturer Fritz Mandel who really existed (a converted Viennese Jew who nevertheless had close contacts with the Italian fascists and German Nazis), and Mandl was really married for a time to Eva Kiesler, better known as the sensational film star Hedy Lamarr, who in this novel is said to have had a brief lesbian relationship with Liesl closest friend, Hana Hanacova. When the Nazis confiscated the Villa Tugendhat, they rented it out to the aircraft manufacturer Walter Messerschmidt. This does happen in the book, but before that, the novel has the villa used as a Eugenics Research Centre, and the people working there are students of Nazi eugenics departments that really existed. Fritz Tugendhat, like Viktor Landauer, did die in 1958; and old Mrs Tugendhat did accept an invitation in 1967 (though in the novel Mawer has Liesel accept the invitation after Dubcek had become General Secretary in January 1968 and makes the actual visit take place after Dubcek's fall, which was in August 1968). I am unfortunately always troubled by such 'poetic licence', by wondering what is fact and what is fiction - not that that detracts in any way from the considerable quality of the novel.

The cultural and political situations described in the book are real enough: the clash between tradition and modernity, the growing tension between Germans and Czechs in Czechoslovakia, the rising menace of Nazi Germany, the refugees pouring into Czechoslovakia after the Anschluss; then the German occupation; then the Russians arrive (a vivid chapter), and they did in fact stable their horses in the Villa Tugendhat. The novel then slightly conflates what happened to the Villa under communist rule: it first became a dance studio and then a rehabilitation centre for crippled children. Finally it becomes a piece of architectural heritage.

Whether fictional or not, the characters and the relationships between them are well drawn. There is especially the uninhibited Hana, Liesel's best friend. Liesel, for all her modern cultural tastes, is much more conventional, though she manages to accommodate herself somehow to live in a menage a trois. When the Nazis take over Czechoslovakia in 1938, the Landauers (like the Tugendhats) emigrate (but to Switzerland and the United States, whereas the Tugendhats went to Venezuela), with a particularly heart-wrenching episode in the process. In the later sections of the book some situations of the earlier part repeat themselves, like variations on a theme: music, like architecture, plays a considerable part in the novel. And the very end is deeply moving.

The Glass Room, at the centre of the novel, has seen so much: political changes have washed through it; much suffering; complicated human relationships; many erotic episodes; confessions. It is redolent with symbolism, some of it elusive. It stands for clarity, light, purity, reason, and harmony, and as such has a hard time surviving in an age of unreason, corruption, darkness and disharmony. But survive it does.

As in his earlier 'The Gospel of Judas' (see my review), Mawer loves using foreign words where English words would do ('Hakenkreuz' for 'swastika', for example - and I did come across two small mistakes in his German). True, sometimes there is no good English equivalent: he rightly says in a postscript that the word 'Raum' has resonances which the word 'room' does not. But this novel is much better and much freer of cliches than that earlier one, and richly deserved to be a contender for the Man-Booker Prize.