EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews
The Glass RoomBy Simon Mawer
Little, Brown; 405pp, £16.99
IT REMAINS possibly the major difficulty facing fiction; the good versus the important. Time and again, a novel, though inferior as a work of art, succeeds through the weight of its subject matter. Simon Mawer's wordy eighth novel, The Glass Room, is important – there is no doubt about that – as it returns to the story of the Nazi takeover of Europe.
The story is interesting, at times fascinating, such as in the building of the house; at times straining credulity. Mawer repeatedly chooses easy solutions; it becomes easy to anticipate what is going to happen next, what trick he will pull out of a battered magician’s hat. But there is a far more serious obstacle, the quality of the writing.
This novel reads as a poor translation. Yet it was written in English. Mawer’s prose is laboured, the characters are unconvincing, the dialogue is stagy and the imagery is frequently convoluted: “Coincidence happens. Paths cross, journeys meet, lives intersect, like the various progressions of articulate but entirely automatic animals, ants maybe, weaving around on a table top, moving, searching with no more sense than robots.”
Viktor Landauer, a newly married and very wealthy Jewish businessman decides to build a wonderful house, he commissions a great architect. The house is full of light and dominated by a glass room, which is more than a room, it is a luminous space. Built on a hilltop the house is a concept, a work of art, an expression of defiance. Here is a rejection of tradition, a statement of intent. All of this is exciting, the couple, Viktor and his new wife, Liesel, a tall Aryan girl, approach married life as if it were a dance.
Mawer sets up a world which draws on the various cultural elements, the Jewish, the German, the Czech and the Austrian. The novel begins some fourteen years after the final collapse of the Hapsburg Empire, it is not mentioned directly, but it is impossible not to be aware of this ghostly presence. Time has passed, but the old chaos remains, and with it, the new threats. When the famous architect, Rainer von Abt, considers the project, he says: “I wish to create a work of art. A work that is the very reverse of sculpture: I wish to enclose a space.”
It is as if Mawer is announcing his intent. After all, he has written a novel that sits on the back of the most dramatic chapter in human history to date, and also, and this vital, some of the finest fiction, most of it written in German.
The objective of the house is “the openness of modern living rather than the secretive and stultified life of the previous century.”
The characters all live quite differently; this is a novel of multiple deceptions. For much of it Mawer relies on a single plot device; sex. Liesel quickly produces a baby. “The house grew, the baby grew.” Viktor without much hesitation, and without Mawer even trying to establish some sense of the choreographed Landauer marriage, responds to a chance pick-up in a Vienna street and begins a frenetic sexual affair.
“And so they talked. It was a strange conversation. From time to time, usually in the factory, [Landauer belongs to a car manufacturing dynasty] he met women of her class. He would exchange pleasantries with them, but they never talked. And now he did talk with this girl, and she was quick and clever and amusing . . . telling him what it was like in the world she inhabited, on the planet of the underclass where who you were mattered little and what you did was all, and that not very much. And where you went with a man when you needed a bit extra.”
Before he has even established a real sense of Viktor, Mawer has already made him a cliché.
Throughout the narrative there are passages that appear to belong more to the popular romantic fiction genre than to the “literary fiction” which is printed on the jacket – passages such as “Vienna had changed. The city of dreams had become a city of nightmares, a city of fear and anticipation. A tide of political violence lapped around the ponderous baroque buildings and although the jolly music, the waltzes and the polkas, continued to be played in the cafes and the ballrooms, the dance was a dance of death.”
Had a romantic novelist written a passage such as this, reviewers would be sneering.
Viktor’s affair intensifies. Mawer strives to create an atmosphere of growing menace, yet this is repeatedly defeated by the flat dialogue. Then the girl, Kata, disappears only to surface as a refugee at Landauer’s home. What happens there is the stuff of farce, as Kata becomes the nanny.
Mawer has a story he believes in; in the house he has a unifying narrative symbol which continually reflects the changing narrative as windows catch the moods of the sky. Yet he has little interest in his characters, they scurry about with cartoon abandon. Liesel is the cardboard spoilt child who grows into an indulged and betrayed wife; complicit and angry. As with her friendship with Hana whose conversation is concerned only with sexual banter, Liesel than reacts sexually to Kata, experiencing what Mawer describes as “a sleek shark of desire.” The family set off for Switzerland.
Meanwhile Mawer continues constructing his narrative with blocks of plot. Most of the characters are defined manly through the complexities of their sexual relations.
Big claims have been made for this novel; after all, here is a British writer entering complex central European territory, particularly that of Austria, the former Czechoslovakia, Germany and the Jewish tragedy. Yet in a year which has already seen the belated publication in English of Hans Fallada's Alone in Berlinand Stefan Zweig's The Post Office Girl, The Glass Roomstaggers under the heavy, uninspiring writing. Short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize on the strength of its important subject matter, certainly not on linguistic grace, this novel has none of the artistry of Adam Foulds's The Quickening Maze, and makes Hilary Mantel's claims with Wolf Hall, all the stronger.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times