Simon Mawer: The Glass Room

“There was, however, a catch. There is always a catch, in stories as in life.”

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The verdict: I could have easily stopped reading this because of the unashamed and irritating amorality of the characters. But Simon Mawer knows how to tell a story and wrap you around his finger.

It’s true what readers who occasionally dabble in cinema are saying: The Glass Room > The Brutalist. I wouldn’t be surprised if the latter admitted to taking inspiration from the former. The twisted parallels are there: Among other details, Modern man’s spiritual aloofness, characters who worship at the altar of their ego, and the pretentiousness that seems to be an essential quality of the zeitgeist.

The Glass Room, but not the ‘room’ of English, expresses the author. Rather, the Teutonic ‘raum’ with a broader sense of space. The novel correspondingly hints at architecture while maintaining a broader sense of architecture by concerning itself beyond the architect and the building, and taking into account the lives that inhabit a particular space. Similarly, it is an acknowledgment of how one cannot write about the Modernist shift in architecture without conveying how it is an entire geopolitical and cultural movement.

While glass seems to reflect not the transparency but rather the fragility of human relationships and ideologies, in its un-clichéd way, this novel concedes that it is architecture that outlives and bears witness to it all.

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“The Glass Room remained indifferent… Below it, lapping up to the foot of the garden, were the rough tides of those political years, while the Landauer House stood beached on the shore above the tidemark…” — The Glass Room, 2009

“…but my buildings were devised to endure such erosion of the Danube’s shoreline.” — The Brutalist, 2024

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