Verbal Magazine

Empty Glass

In the run up to the nominations for the booker prize earlier this year, Simon Mawer, making the shortlist with The Glass Room, was described by many critics as an outsider, an almost rookie writer in contrast to the other well known literary heavyweights who were nominated.

The truth however is that Mawer has published 8 novels and has been writing, professionally at least, for the past twenty years.
“I started to create stories when I was about ten or eleven years old and from then on I wanted to be a novelist. It takes a long time to learn how to do it reasonably well and a lot of other things got in the way - a few years climbing, then getting married and having a family - so it was rather late when I actually put something together that was good enough to submit to agents or publishers. I was 38 by the time that happened - the novel, Chimera, was accepted by Hamish Hamilton on first submission so I must have got something right.”
The Glass Room is set in a house in Czechoslovakia in 1929. A young Jewish Couple, Viktor and Liesel Landauer see their comfortable middle class life transformed into chaos as the political turmoil of Europe unfolds.
The novel uses the house (The Glass Room) as a device to mark the gradual changes of the political landscape over the twentieth century.
Jumping between past and present, Mawer weaves a subtle masterpiece of a novel, juxtaposing the conflict between the domestic home and the outside world, drenched in the background of the chaotic scenes of Europe in the Second World War.
The theories on racial differentiation and the disturbing efforts that Nazi Doctors put into testing Jewish people; before sending them on to death camps are written about in close detail in this book, the bulk of it coming from scientific reading that Mawer undertook in his research of the novel. Perhaps not such a daunting task given that Mawer has spent the last thirty years as a biology teacher.

“A lot of the stuff on race was based on knowledge I already had from writing my earlier novel, Mendel’s Dwarf. What I describe as happening in the Landauer House is pretty much what German academics were doing at the time. It all grew out of the biometrics movement started by Francis Galton (a cousin of Charles Darwin) and Karl Pearson in Britain, and taken up with enthusiasm in the United States. Good sources of information are the books Murderous Science by Benno Muller-Hill, Racial Hygiene by Robert Proctor and In the Name of Eugenics by Daniel Kevles. I certainly hope science has influenced me in my writing. I am fascinated by things scientific - indeed I consider the scientific method the principle achievement of the human mind.”

While his research on this may have been on the money, there are some problems that inevitably come with writing a historical novel: for example the contrast between the Nazis and the Russians may be a little bit simplistic in its dissection of history, something which Mawer doesn’t deny altogether when challenged on the matter.

“Ultimately in war we are all losers, aren’t we? Who are the winners in The Glass Room? I tried to show the Russians as the liberators that they appeared to be, to many people at the time. The difficulty in writing this kind of historical fiction is to make sure that characters react in ways that are appropriate. After all, the people of Czechoslovakia didn’t know that the country was going to become a Soviet dictatorship. That didn’t happen until 1948. All the Czechs saw was the Red Army liberating their country. But, yes, it can be difficult to avoid anachronisms.”

Mawer says the three greatest human experiences ultimately are birth, love, and death. In The Glass Room we are constantly reminded of all three, particularly love, where infidelity and sexual desire slither up and down the pages of the novel like a snake, chapter after chapter. Although Mawer describes himself as an atheist, there is a prolonged fascination with the guilty pleasures of sexual desire throughout the book. Although sexuality was much more repressed in the 1930s, Mawer says as humans even in a liberal western 21st century we are not as understanding in matters of sexuality as we might think.

“There was a great deal of sexual repression in those days - and a rather modern liberation only amongst a very few, such as Hana (a promiscuous character who has several affairs in the book). But I’m not sure that things are very much different these days. Sexuality is still very confusing, however you look at it. It is the most powerful human emotion and the one that can be most misused: from exaltation to degradation in the blink of an eye. For all other animals it is just a bodily function but for human beings it’s the agony and the ecstasy, sometimes both at the same time.”

Mawer maintains that the writer should be able to mould and craft language the way a sculptor would with clay, something he says they cannot teach you in a creative writing course. When you read The Glass Room, it’s apparent that there are a number of subtle mechanisms going on simultaneously throughout the book. The pace of the language is slow, like a true craftsman however, Mawer takes his time piecing together his ideas on the page. What we come to in the end of the novel, with the house as a symbol, says Mawer, is the basic principles behind the ideology of modernism.

“For a number of years I had known the real house that is the model for the Landauer House, but the idea of a novel based around it only came after a long gestation. But once thought out it seems rather obvious: the ideals of the modernist movement destroyed by the awful events of the 20th century: light against darkness.”

It’s in this darkness where Mawer finds his muse. A good writer he may be, but optimism is definitely not one of his strong points, but then again if he were an optimist he might not have written such a great novel.

“I think the basic premise of The Glass Room arose quite naturally out of the contrast between light and dark. It wasn’t planned in any logical manner, but then little of my writing is planned in advance. Sweetness and light doesn’t make for very interesting reading. And it is the dark aspects of humanity that we have to wrestle with, isn’t it? I certainly don’t have a very optimistic view of the human condition, but then, why should I? In the long run there’s nothing to be optimistic about. We’re all destined to die.”

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