A Magical Room

I enjoyed Simon Mawer's The Glass Room. Strictly speaking it's historical fiction, in the sense that the author focuses on the impact of the political on the personal. Yet for the most part Mawer avoids the rigid quid pro quo that too often makes such work rigidly obvious. Chechoslovakia commissioned by Viktor Landauer and his bride Liesel in the years between the two world wars. Landauer, a wealthy (and Jewish) manufacturer of motor cars, is intrigued by the possibilities of a different sort of life that he finds inherent in the work of Rainer von Abt, a fictional architect clearly influenced by the Bauhaus movement. In fact, in a recent issue of The New York Review of Books there was a photo of a house that looked very much like what von Abt designs for the Landauers.
The glass room is the heart of the house, open to the light, and with windows that disappear to let nature in. As such, it becomes a symbol of what is best about the Landauer's life, such as their freedom, and also what is most threatening. For both of them, it becomes a symbol not just of beauty and the good life--the Landauers have two children--but of sexual fulfillment and transgression--as the years past, Liesel has a lesbian affair with her best friend, Hana, and Viktor begins a long and complex affair with a woman he picks up off the streets in Vienna and whom later becomes a central part of the Landauers' lives. The glass room figures significantly in all of this, both literally and figuratively.
The reader knows all along that the war is going to disrupt this family's life and soon it does. In time they begin a new life in America, but not before the house is taken over by the Nazis and used for quasi-scientific experiments to establish the degeneracy of the Jews. After them come the Communists, with a former servant reinvented as a Commissar there to greet Liesel when she returns years later, blind but still able to feel the power of her beloved house and room.
All in all, Mawer's novel is good reading. The Landauers are both believable characters, as is the all-important Hana. The town in which they live, their friends and family, the scene in Vienna, all this is vividly shown. There are two scenes on the ferris wheel in Vienna--remember The Third Man?--that took me right there. I felt, however, that the ending was much too contrived, as if Mawer was determined to tie everything up, to provide a tidy closure to a situation that was anything but.