Castlebar Book Club
The Book Club meets once a month (usually the second Tuesday of the month) in Castlebar Library at 8.00pm. Check events page for next meeting. (Previous Book Club selections)
The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
Simon Mawer’s latest book is a historical novel set in Czechoslovakia in the late 1930s. Historical novels are usually possessed of horrid, obvious and multiple weaknesses and flaws - bogus dialogue, fetishistic images and scenes, ignorant conflations: sinister, ersatz entertainment. And although Mawer is the author of a number of rather fine novels - including The Gospel of Judas and The Fall - he is probably best known for his Peter Mayle-ish A Place in Italy (1992). So the omens are not good. And all the initial signs are unpromising: The Glass Room is a book about a culture slipping from decadence into catastrophic decline. It's a study of a marriage. It concerns itself with art, music, architecture, indignity, loneliness, terror, betrayal, sex. And the Holocaust. It should, therefore, be pretentious, unbearable schlock of the most appalling kind. But it's not. It is, unexpectedly, a thing of extraordinary beauty and symmetry.
The Glass Room is a novel of ideas, yet strongly propelled by plot and characterised by an almost dreamlike simplicity of telling. Comparisons with the work of Michael Frayn would not be misplaced, and there are occasional moments of illuminating brilliance, when the novel becomes like the Glass Room of the title. "It had become a palace of light, light bouncing off the chrome pillars, light refulgent on the walls ... It was as though they stood inside a crystal of salt."
But one should, of course, enter the book by the main entrance, via the plot. Wealthy Jewish car manufacturer Viktor Landauer and his gentile wife Liesel have been made a gift of land by Liesel's parents to build their own house. "Something good and solid," Liesel's father advises. But Viktor doesn't want something good and solid: what he wants is something modern. And what he gets is a modernist masterpiece, Der Glasraum, the Glass Room.
The architect employed by Viktor is a man named Rainer von Abt, a disciple of Adolf Loos. "I wish to take Man out of the cave and float him in the air," Von Abt proclaims. "I wish to give him a glass space to inhabit." The house, when it is built, has vast windows, an onyx wall, white ceilings and white floors. It is the definitive modern house, for definitive modern people. Viktor is a great believer in inovace and pokrok - innovation and progress. "Everywhere he takes with him the new creed and proclaims it with all the enthusiasm of a prophet. 'This is where the world of commerce is leading us,' he explains. 'Into a world of peace and trade, where the only battles fought are battles for market share.'" It's the late 1930s: Viktor is woefully mistaken.
The Glass Room is not merely a piece of architecture within the book: it is the architecture of the book. All the characters interact with and within the house in some way; all plot revelations take place within its shimmering walls; history doesn't take place outside it, it comes to it. Abandoned by the fleeing Landauers, the Glass Room is taken over by the Nazis for scientific experiments, and then claimed by the communists, before becoming a museum, and the site for a final scene of recognition and redemption. This could easily be over-ingenious or simply absurd, a device ripe for parody.
The Glass Room is a rare thing: popular historical fiction with integrity. When they make it into a film, which they will, they'll ruin it.
The Guardian
"...a haunting read... You'll be swept up into the lives of people struggling to find happiness in frightening times. What's amazing is how Mawer perfectly crafts each character and cleverly weaves their experiences together."
News of the World
"Written so intelligently and seriously that it avoids all traps of sentimentality, it explores the impossibility of perfect vision even as the author displays his own."
Sunday Telegraph
"Here at last is a novel informed by exceptional intelligence...the clarity with which it is written is almost unfamiliar and certainly to be admired.
The ending is infinitely moving. It should be emphasised that this is not the sort of house that features in most English novels. There are no echoes of Brideshead here. This house — long, low, rectilinear — does not inspire sentimentality. It is its unfamiliar purity which is its outstanding feature, and this purity also characterises the novel itself. There is little sex, little weather, and a total absence of stylistic flourishes. It is, in sum, a humanist novel, unusual in its breadth and scope, and also in its dignity. Definitely Bookerish."
The Spectator
"Mawer is a gifted and persuasive writer. In particular, he deftly conjures up the proportions and the atmosphere of the Landauer house itself. He has a good ear for dialogue, and the novel has some darkly comic passages...
In Mawer’s hands [the glass room] becomes a means for exploring the way people’s hopes for the future become part of their history. This he does beautifully.
The openness of the glass room is matched by the transparency of the novel’s plot. The Landauers’ lives are on display to the reader from the start, and there is little sense that any character in the novel has a secret life. Nor can there be much doubt as to how things will turn out, in a narrative whose turns are contingent on such well-known historical episodes. But if The Glass Room offers little in the way of suspense, it remains a compelling work of fiction. Indeed, it is the inevitability of events which make it compelling, as we chart the building’s journey from modernity to beautiful obsolescence."
TLS
"[The] beautifully realised setting does not overwhelm its fictional inhabitants. [Mawer] avoids excessive character analysis and lets the Landauers and their circle gradually reveal themselves by their actions, often in convincingly unexpected ways...
...As the story ends in 1990, with the house a museum, the recent history of the real house does not figure. The Tugendhats have filed for restitution under the law on artworks looted by the Nazis, which will require a legal ruling on whether a house can really be, as von Abt proclaims, a work of art. An intriguing angle missed. But still, Mawer's own work of art is a largely sound and satisfying one."
Sunday Times
"Mr Mawer likes to write about ideas, which makes him unusual among British novelists. “The Glass Room” is a carefully constructed book, beautifully written. If there is a flaw, it is a lack of contact with the characters—the only figure portrayed with feeling is the flippant and omnisexual Hana Hanakova, who becomes the real survivor of the story. However, this narrative distance emphasises the fact that to the glass room, indifferent and ageless, people pass through “like summer mayflies with their gossamer wings and delicate tails and ephemeral lives”. The novel succeeds as a reminder of the transient nature of human existence."
The Economist
"...powerful and elegiac... Mawer’s poetic and masterful prose is flawless from beginning to end. Having based ‘Der Glasraum’ on a nameless but existing building, with all its lives, desires, tragedies and triumphs, the reader is as ensnared as the various inhabitants by its unique beauty and organic tangibility."
Sunday Business Post
- Reader's Review site with active discussion board
- Dedicated to book clubs, ReadersPlace.co.uk (Random House) is a website where reading groups can find inspiration, have their say on books, and connect with other book clubs and authors.
- CompletelyNovel.com links readers as well as new writers, offering a one-stop author-reader experience.
- Book Group Links: A selection of sites compiled by the Salt Lake City Library.
- Great Books Foundation: The grandfather of them all
- Reading Group Choices Online: Over 550 guides from publishers. 150 can be printed from the site
- Reading Group Guides: A very useful selection of reading group guides from Random House Publishers
- Writer's Resource site for writers of all abilities