26 Books

The Glass Room has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize this year, and being one of only two books on the list that vaguely piqued my interest (the other was J.M. Coetzee’s Summertime, of which more in another post), I picked it up. Wrong, wrong wrong.

The novel – if it’s accurate to call it that – bears all of the stamps of the creative writing curse. Heavily researched? Check. Historical context? Check. Uses more words than necessary? Check. Finds a reason to use the words ‘ineffable’, ‘ineluctable’, ‘refulgent’ and ‘evanescent’? Check.

The Glass Room

Simon Mawer
Little, Brown 2009, Hardcover, 406 pages, £16.99

The book is centred on a building, a modernist house built in the late 1920s for a wealthy Czech car maker called Landauer. He and his family live in it in a paragon of the modernist lifestyle (’ornament is a crime’) until the war intervenes and disperses them, their circle of friends, and ends the building’s use as a home.

The house’s pièce de résistance is the living area, which is open plan and features enormous floor to ceiling windows: the glass room of the title. Mawer insists on describing this room and its features repeatedly. Barely a page goes by without some detail of it being mentioned again. It is variously used as a recital room, a laboratory in the Nazi’s ’scientific’ attempt to describe the different characteristics of the races, a gymnasium and the locus of a great deal of sex.

Mawer has the teenage boy’s fascination with sex of all kinds – especially lesbianism – but describes it in a coy faux literary style that avoids anyone calling a prick a prick except when he wants to shock. Since these words are not actually shocking to us, he has one of the characters vocalise the indignation we’re supposed to be feeling on their behalf. (By the way, given all the sex, he spurns several perfectly good opportunities to use the word ‘tumescent’, a favourite of the creative writing novel.)

Mawer’s book is clearly inspired in many ways by Milan Kundera’s masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being. He has a womanising doctor called Tomáš, whose lover Zdenka is based on Kundera’s Tereza, and it features a promiscuous bisexual woman – Hana – who is obviously inspired by Sabina. He has characters give voice to several ideas that also link it with Kundera’s great novel (the idea that Tomáš will end up provoking the authorities and be forced into a menial job, and the idea that the face – often a thing of beauty – is actually a covering for the body’s plumbing, for example). The city that most of the action occurs in – the fictional Mesto – is fairly clearly based on Brno, Kundera’s hometown, and even features a character called Kundera, who shares important biographical details with the novelist’s father.

Mawer is keen on splattering the text with Czech and German words, one of which is litost, a word that if he’s read any Kundera at all he will know from there – it’s important enough in his work that it’s the name of a section of The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. He does this as though we’ve never encountered a foreign word before. At the end of the book there’s a perplexing afterword in which Mawer tries to explain that in German the word ‘raum’ does not translate literally as ‘room’ in the sense of living room. It’s more like ’space’ (and of course is one of the many German words whose meaning was infected by the Nazis). He says this as though he will be criticised for calling the book The Glass Room rather than The Glass Space, as if it’s a translation. He frequently reminds us that in German one would say ‘der Glasraum’, which he does so he can point out that ‘der Glasraum’ is one character away from the German for ‘the glass dream’ (i.e. ‘der Glastraum’). This would be a nice little detail if he didn’t belabour it so heavily.

This procedure is shot right through the book, and Mawer can’t resist pointing out how many things he’s referring to. He has a coy way of having characters mention the names of now famous artists to emphasise that at that point they weren’t so well known. Mondrian is given this treatment among others. It’s even more repulsive when he uses the same technique on Reinhard Heydrich, including a nauseating reference to his fencing ability. One feels that Mawer has swallowed a whole stack of textbooks on the period and is spewing up little factoids every now and again just to show that he’s done his research. The problem is that he can’t do this subtly; he has to tell us he’s doing it. This is either unnecessary or patronising. Take your pick.

Annoying as they are, these flaws are all somewhat tangential to the real reason that this book is so bad. For a start, It is written in a depressingly conventional way. Not once do we step outside of the omniscient narrative, and this is confused somewhat by sometimes being in the past tense and sometimes in the historic present.

But the biggest flaw is that, although there is a parade of characters, each of whom Mawer does his best to imbue with some life, the centre of the novel is the building, the Laundauer House. A building. Perhaps not a problem in another book, but here there are events of unparalleled horror going on around the characters, and we’re meant to have some problem with the fate of the building. Landauer is Jewish and prescient enough to get out of Czechoslovakia in time. So that’s alright then.

The sole concession to the reality of the Holocaust is the death of two characters, whose fate is entirely offstage. As with so much fictional writing about the Holocaust, we’re supposed to get choked up because two relatively privileged characters we have lived with for a few pages are caught up in it. The novelist doesn’t respect out moral compass enough to think that we can be outraged by the deaths of people whose names we don’t even know and whose lives we know nothing about. Forgive me, but two vague fictional deaths in the context of six million actual ones is insulting. We are not horrified by the Holocaust because people we know died, but because an entire people was singled out for mechanised extermination. It doesn’t need to be personalised to be brought home. If novelists can’t see this distinction, they shouldn’t be taking the subject on.

Notwithstanding that problem, the plot doesn’t do anything like enough to make us care what happens to the characters, and certainly not about their multiple affairs. If two characters meet, it’s likely that they will fall in love and have horizon-expanding sex. Almost all of the female characters are either lesbians, bisexual or bi-curious as we would say today. All of them are nymphomaniacs, or at least defined by their sexual activity. It’s a profoundly misogynistic book.

There are so many things to dislike about this book, and I haven’t even mentioned the number of preposterous coincidences that the plot relies on. The Booker shortlist looks pretty dire this year (Coetzee excepted), but there has to be a better book than The Glass Room on there. If there isn’t, they should just refuse to award the prize.

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