The Glass Room

When the Man Booker longlist of 2009 was announced I didn't know anything at all about The Glass Room by Simon Mawer and it didn't appeal. In fact, I was deterred because the book's cover reminded me of one of my University textbooks. The Booker enabled me to read a book that I would not have read otherwise and I have been rewarded. The Glass Room is an exceptional novel and I am now championing it to win this year's prize; it is definitely in contention for my book of the year although that doesn't come with a cheque for £50,000 and international acclaim.

All of the six Booker shortlisted novels are set in the past. The Glass Room is set in the Modernist period and encompasses the lead up to WWII and its aftermath and its affect on one house, one family, and the people they love.

The Glass Room, the subject and character, is a room of glass (clever things are done with the Czech and German translations where it also means the room of tranquility), the feature room in a modernist home. Architect Rainer von Abt creates a dream-home for a newly married couple, Viktor and Liesel Landauer; the Landauer House becomes an architectural sensation, a piece of art in its own right. The novel follows the Landauer House and its exquisite glass room, an open space of light and balance, through the history of an unsettled Eastern Europe and its time as a family home; a Nazi laboratory; a shelter from war; a physiotherapy gymnasium; and a museum from private ownership into Nazi hands to Soviet ones to those of the Czechoslovak state. The passing of ownership illegally is one of the novel's central themes - who owns art? Is it the property of the artist, the commissioner, or the public, and can a building legally be considered a work of art? A curious question in light of the author's note, where Mawer states that although The Glass Room is a work of fiction, its house and setting are not (apparently the Landauer House is modelled on the Villa Tugendhat in Brno, in today's Czech Republic. It would seem from the brief entry I have linked to that Viktor and Liesel Landauer are also loosely modelled on the couple who had the house designed and built).

The writing in The Glass House is exceptional and the story deeply compelling; where you are shown the dramatic and breathtaking quality of the glass room so too do you experience a narrative that parallels it. The house is imbued with a past full of love and lust and witnesses the best and worst of Eastern European history and stands as testimony to endurance. The personal stories are engrossing but it is the story of the house that is awe-inspiring. If I can draw a crude comparison: Sarah Waters' personified Hundreds Hall, home to the Ayres family, in the Booker shortlisted The Little Stranger pales in comparison to the wonder that is the Landauer House.

Beautifully written and rendered, The Glass House sustains a leitmotif throughout of light, balance and space. I found it engrossing from the opening pages and was immersed in the lives of Viktor and Liesel, a Jew and a Gentile, and most of all of Liesel's close friend, Hana, who is a remarkabe character. I was wowed by this novel, its content and style, and thoroughly rewarded.

Some favourite passages (I didn't take note of many as I almost loved them all):

The house grew, the baby grew. The latter was a strange and rapid metamorphosis, punctuated by events of moment: the grasp of her hands, the focus of her eyes, her first smile, her recognition of Liesel and Viktor, the first time she raised herself on her hands, the first laugh. The growth of the house was more measured: the laying of steel beams, the pouring of concrete, the encapsulating of space. And ten delay, problems with materials and the workforce, argument and frustration stretching over the summer and the autumn before things were resolved.

How do you dismember a body? There are two fundamentally different approaches – that of the surgeon and that of the mad axeman. The one is cool and calculating and progressive, with the application of bone-saw, scalpel and shears. The other is a frenzy of hacking and tearing, with blood everywhere and the taste of iron in the mouth. But whichever way you do it the result is the same – dismemberment.