Simon Mawer on The Glass Room
‘Splintered vowels and obscure consonants.’
Congratulations on being longlisted for this year's Man Booker Prize for Fiction. The Glass Room is a novel set in 1930s Czechoslovakia. You've been praised for mastering the Czech and German languages to give the book its authenticity. Are you a natural linguist?
That's a wonderful idea but I'm afraid I am not. I speak Italian adequately and English well enough to pass as a native but I have no German or Czech whatsoever. Yet both languages inevitably inform much of the narrative of The Glass Room because the city of Město was bilingual for most of the period I was writing about. So I simply treated the two languages as objects of research, much as I did with papyrology for The Gospel of Judas and genetics in Mendel's Dwarf. It was like panning for gold, sifting through the silt of translation dictionaries for nuggets I could use. I can give an example of the way it works. Searching through the dictionary, you find that one of the Czech words for "room" is pokoj. So, Skleněný Pokoj is The Glass Room. But, if you go nosing around in the other side of the dictionary, the Czech side, amongst all those arresting Slavic sounds, those splintered vowels and obscure consonants - you discover treasure. Pokoj is more than room: it is also means "tranquillity" or "peace". How wonderful to be able to feel with Tomáš, as he smokes and looks out of the great windows on the grey and oppressive city, the import of Skleněný Pokoj: The Glass Room, yes, but also The Glass Tranquillity. Pure serendipity.
Apparently I succeeded in this enterprise well enough to convince the Czechs themselves: the Czech language translation of The Glass Room is to be published in September.
There seems to be a parallel between the cold architecture of The Glass Room and a coldness in the relationship between Viktor and Liesel. Do you believe that we create living environments that are simply extensions of ourselves?
Oh dear, this is one of those abstract questions that leave me bewildered. I often think I would be happy living in a tent. As long as there could be bookshelves. But is the Landauer House cold? It is cool, yes, but cool is good. I know that because I have to live through the Italian summer. The main feature of the house, of the Glass Room in particular, is that it is transparent and filled with light. That's an ideal that modernism attempted to introduce to a world that was full of obscurity. Think how often we still hear demands or pleas for transparency in public life. And yet there is nothing less transparent than the human mind and therein lies the central conflict in The Glass Room: the contrast between the ideal transparency of the modernist movement and the awful, looming darkness of National Socialism; and the contrast between the transparency of the Landauers' public life and the obscurity of their private lives. But I'm offering an interpretation of my own book, which is not my business. For better or for worse, that's the job of the reader.
The Glass Room is your eighth novel and you've also written two non-fiction titles. Does writing fiction come more easily to you?
Quite the contrary. I find non fiction easy and fiction monstrously difficult. But I have no desire to write non fiction and be bound by the limits that a subject imposes. In this respect any work of non fiction is a rather hum-drum, circumscribed affair: you always know what you must write about, even though you may not yet have the exact words. Quite the opposite of a novel. When writing a novel, particularly when starting, each page is entirely blank, empty not only of words but also of ideas. The terror of the blank page, but also the thrill. It's like living a human life in miniature: initially the possibilities are endless, just as a child's potentialities may seem limitless. But as you progress through the book you make choices, shut off possibilities, impose limits and restrictions, just as you do in life. And finally all that is left is the end. Perhaps you might conclude with a flourish but the whole point has been getting there, just as the whole point of a life is in the living of it, rather than the dying. It is given to few to write a great novel, just as it is given to few to live a great life. But it must be worth trying.
You were forty when you wrote your first novel. Had you wanted to write a novel long before that?
Is forty really so old? Looking back from my current perspective, it seems youthful enough. I suppose I was in my late thirties before I felt I could no longer assess the value of my own work and needed someone objective to pass judgment. Up to then I'd always been my own sternest critic and I hadn't considered my work good enough. So I sent the MS of Chimera off to a couple of agents and the one who said yes sold it on first submission to Hamish Hamilton. Over the phone the head of HH asked me whether it really was a first novel. I think he suspected I was hiding behind a nom-de-plume, which was flattering enough; and when I told him my age (38 at the time), he didn't seem to think it was a bad thing at all to have held back.
But the real answer to the question is that I decided to be a novelist when I was very young - eleven? twelve? - and it did take me a long time to come up with something that was worth publishing. I suppose I have to put that down to the ordinary distractions of life - falling in and out of love, falling off mountains, falling for marriage and over the pram in the hall, all that kind of thing. It's easy enough to lose a decade along the way. A chilling thought when you no longer have decades to spare.
Your next novel is entitled Trapeze. Can you tell us a little bit more about it?
Not really. I talk about it privately, but I'm reluctant to do so publicly. It is frightening enough the way in which you lose control of a book when it is published; I would hate that to happen when this book is only half-formed. Trapeze is nothing more than a working title; I doubt it'll survive to publication. All I can say about it is that it's set in the 1940s and the protagonist is a woman. I am particularly gripped by the period of the Thirties and Forties, which is when part of The Fall is set, and, of course, most of The Glass Room. Actually, I notice The Glass Room being referred to as a historical novel. I'm not sure that is a useful description. A true historical novel attempts to recapture the distant past in terms that the present can comprehend, a task that is fraught with dangers. But the early decades of the twentieth century are directly accessible to my generation. They were the decades of my parents' youth. I lived them through their memories just as I live the Fifties through my own memories. And yet distance gives a perspective that you cannot have when observing the present. So I am happy with that period, and that is when Trapeze is set. But what is it about? For the moment I'm afraid that must remain a secret. I can say that the protagonist is called Marian, and Alice, and Anne-Marie, all three of those names, and she is half French. Another language issue. I like writing from a woman's point of view and I think I do it quite well. In fact, a prospective publisher even turned down one of my early books (A Jealous God - a collector's item these days, I guess) qualifying her rejection with, "He writes wonderfully from a woman's point of view. In fact I'd have made an offer had it been written by a woman." True.
To download a free audio extract of The Glass Room to your mobile phone Text MBP to 60300 (text messages charged at your standard network rate) or follow the link http://gospoken.com/a/mbp09 (only viewable on mobile internet) or visit our audio page to listen online.
You can read more about Simon Mawer's work at www.simonmawer.com
