Lands of Glass. By Alessandro Baricco, translated by Alastair McEwen. Hamish Hamilton, 230 pp. £16.99 sterlingKarl Marx was in London during the inauguration of the Great Exhibition of 1851, but, unaccountably, failed to record his impression of that vast cornucopia of industry and empire, the transient monument to free trade and its less than free minions.
Instead, we have the strangely fascinated pages of Capital in which he describes for the first time the fetishization of commodities, the great eerie "phantasmagoria" in which mere objects are transformed into their spectral doubles: a metamorphosis, says Marx, just as weird as the levitating furniture supposedly encoutered at then-fashionable séances.
The occult power of the commodity was nowhere more in evidence than in the building chosen to house the exhibition: Paxton's Crystal Palace, which haunts Alessandro Baricco's novel like a ghost from an imagined future. Paxton's confection of iron and glass, which enclosed 18 acres of Hyde Park (including an avenue of venerable elms) in eight months, was a deliberate amalgam of modernity and magic. The exhibition's catalogue declares it the only building in the world in which the atmosphere is visible, the spectator "enveloped in a bluish halo".
Lands of Glass predates Silk and City, the svelte but luminous narratives that have made Baricco's name among Anglophone enthusiasts of his blend of historical fiction and a magical reality schooled on Borges, Calvino and Eco. The moment of wondrous modernity described by Marx is here refracted in a series of crystalline narratives that border the great public displays of Victorian ambition.
This is not, strictly speaking, the story of the Crystal Palace, but of its half-real shadows, the grand imaginings that might have been, had Paxton not intervened with a project that met the strictures of budget and timetable. It is the story of Hector Horeau, joint winner (with the Dublin architect Richard Turner) of the competition to design the exhibition's home. In Baricco's account, Horeau not only gives the Crystal Palace its fairy-tale name, but is the first to imagine such a structure, to conjure up the image of a whole city under glass: the 19th century's dream of the 20th.
Horeau's story, with its resonant metaphors of vision and enlightenment, liberation and enclosure, is reflected in that of the glass maker to whom he turns to realize his fantasy. He too harbours dreams of a fantastic future: the aptly-named Mr Rail has for years been planning a railway, without, initially, any particular destination in mind. Its distant terminus will later become crucial for the private narrative that shadows his public ambitions. But his literal lack of direction is typical of a novel that situates much of its action in wholly fictional territory: a vision of 19th-century Europe as a disorientingly utopian non-place.
Mr Rail's utopia is constantly in motion. In a marvellous, visionary passage, Baricco imagines the magical transformation of the imagination effected by the railway. Where once each town lived sequestered in its own unique time, the railway wards off confusion and disaster by reducing all to a uniform "railway time": a clock shuttles ceaselessly between London and Dublin in an implacable act of temporal union. At the same time, passengers traverse a strangely atomized landscape, "chopped up into thousands of images a second long, wrenched away by an invisible force": a frantic rosary of instants that would only be put together again with the invention of cinema.
Lands of Glass, however, is not exhausted by these frenzied technological tales. The epic failures of Horeau and Rail are mirrored in the lives of a colourful host of minor characters, each with his or her own crackpot scheme for defusing a sinister, threatening future. The novel is full of their (often horribly doomed) plans and pointless rituals, tiny utopian efforts at togetherness in the face of an unknowable modernity.
"There's too much world!" exclaims one character, desperately trying to record everything he learns in a notebook. A prototype telephone fails when the voice, apparently, runs out of energy before reaching its destination.
If the metaphors of fragile vision occasionally come too thickly clotted to avoid cliché (the child as concrete hope on an otherwise wavering horizon, for example), the lightness of Baricco's touch ensures that his glittering and comic edifice remains standing.
Brian Dillon teaches literature at the University of Kent. He is currently writing a book on culture and melancholy
