The Glass Room by Simon Mawer – Seeing Through Motive and Behaviour

In his novel, The Glass Space, Simon Mawer begins with a image of privilege. By way of that he explores human relationships, households, history, sexuality and change, to list just a handful of of the components and themes that function. Not only does he blend these and other penetrating concepts, he also consistently and utterly engages the reader, draws the observer in so efficiently that often the encounter is participatory. The Glass Room is a novel that succeeds on so many levels that it becomes challenging to assessment. The only comment is that you really should read it.

So why commence with a shortcoming? Nicely, the commence is as good a location as any to record The Glass Room’s only weakness, which relates to the identity of the loved ones that forms the book’s focus, the Landauers. Victor has married Liesel. He is a wealthy man, an industrialist, an owner of a firm that makes vehicles. One particular would expect such a person to reside and breathe his operate rather a lot more than he does. Consequently, he often appears much less of a character than he surely ought to have been, rather aloof, some thing of a automobile for the women involved. So the primary criticism of a multi-themed, multi-layered book is that it could have pursued a single more thought!

But The Glass Room’s real focus seems to be on the lives of its ladies. There are three central female characters that form the book’s backbone. A lot of the book’s success is to see events separately, from their different individual perspectives.

Liesel is a German speaker, married to the vehicle-maker, Viktor, who is Jewish and Czech. They are wealthy, unapologetically so, and commission a popular architect to style and create a home to be their family members house near Prague. It is to be a property to finish all houses. The Glass Room is the result, al ultra-modern day, modernist, Bauhaus home with more light than can be imagined. Drastically, its locations of glass make it open to the globe, a transparency inside which a marriage grows gradually murkier towards the opaque.

Hana – let’s use a shortened version of her name – is a family members buddy. She is rather off-beat compared to the apparently standard Landauers. Initially we know small of her own domestic life, circumstances that turn out to be hugely substantial later on. Hana becomes Liesel’s confidante, her closest friend. Her economic status is not that of the Landauers, but this does not appear to create a barrier.

Kata is a distinct kind of twentieth century heroine. She creates a life for herself with apparent pragmatism beneath the guarding umbrella of Viktor Landauer’s wealth and power. It may appear that he retains the upper hand, that he constantly writes the rules, but this story is much more subtle than that.

When war comes the Glass Room is left behind. It adjustments. A deranged fascist project occupies its space. (Does that sentence include a tautology?) A self-deceiving but damaged psychopath exploits an ideologically-driven, self-justifying search for a science of race. At least these scientists know what they are searching for. It’s a pity they should remain blind to the results. What they located they sought to enjoy, but it wasn’t information.

The war affects each and every character differently and we follow them and their fortunes across Europe and across continents. Interestingly, it really is the economically advantaged who have the very best probabilities. As in history, the poor just disappear. And by the end we have lived the characters’ lives virtually alongside them. We have sensed the joy, the terror, the suffering and, most acutely, the deception and duplicity. The author’s footnote states that Der Glasraum does not necessarily translate to The Glass Room, considering that “raum” implies one thing much less defined, one thing a lot more, like space or environment. The book captivates, its characters confide in us, but paradoxically the image of The Glass Space only seldom suggests transparency.