The Glass Room
By Simon Mawer
Little, Brown £16.99, 416 pages
FT Bookshop price: £13.59

Whenever a novel sets its main action in one evocative place, guiding us through passing epochs in that same fixed location, the reader may suspect that the novel’s main character is Time itself: the old enemy, ever-present and fundamentally indifferent to our human follies.

Simon Mawer’s The Glass Room is one such novel. Not that it lacks drama or passion – indeed it is preoccupied by flesh and sexuality. But it does achieve a rather Parnassian detachment from its characters. Mawer has drawn inspiration from an architectural wonder, Ludwig Mies Van der Rohe’s Villa Tugendhat in Brno: a jewel of European modernism and a space that has had many and varied uses over the years, as does Mawer’s fictional Landauer House.

Mawer’s novel opens in 1968 on a hill overlooking the provincial town of Mesto in communist Czechoslovakia. Elderly Liesel Landauer, blind but acutely sensitive, makes an emotionally charged return to her old marital home, now a state-approved “work of art”. Inching round this immaculate steel-framed open-plan villa, Liesel is borne back to the past.

It is now 1929: honeymooning automobile magnate Viktor Landauer and his gentile bride (Liesel) are thrilled to make the acquaintance of the celebrated architect Rainer von Abt, self-professed “poet of light and space and form”. The Landauers are thoroughly modern, Viktor a dynamic exemplar of Mitteleuropean Jewry who considers his “brand new” Czechoslovakia a place where he will surely never be “pinned down by race or creed”. As such, he’s susceptible to von Abt’s particular brand of the International Style, and commissions a home from him.

Mawer steers us to see that the masculine appreciation of form is a highly eroticised business. Viktor and von Abt each have a sexual thrust to their tempers, and while Liesel becomes a mother of two, Viktor loses his head over Kata, a pretty, savvy city girl he meets on business in Vienna. His desire for her is a vertigo that leaves melancholy in its wake; yet when he learns that Kata has a daughter, he turns paternal.

Narrating in a formidable third-person, Mawer proposes that Viktor would be an apt patient for “that other Moravian-German Jew, Sigmund Freud”. A more challenging study for the good doctor would be Liesel’s friend Hana Hanáková, a thrilling female with pansexual tendencies who holds umpteen theories on love and lust, from the aesthetic superiority of lesbianism to the linkage between a man’s heart and groin.

Ostensibly frivolous, Hana proves to be the seer of a coming storm. “It’s too good to last”, she says of all things. The enlightened Landauers are fractionally slower to attend to the daubing of swastikas and the tread of Panzers. But fascism is a rival modernity, and the cultured bourgeois world of Prague and Vienna is about to be reduced to ash.

Among the fleeing Viennese who seek refuge at the Landauer House are Kata and her daughter. Viktor’s deceitful polygamist instincts come to full flower as Kata is made houseguest and then nanny, before the entire household must flee the Nazi troops in this awkward configuration of “six characters in search of a home.” America holds out the affirming flame of hope to the Landauers, as it does to Von Abt (and as it did to Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe.)

Back in Mesto, the dark falls yet faster. The Landauer House becomes a “biometric centre” directed by a professor of racial science, devoted to the separation of herrenvolk (master race) and untermenschen (underclass) and the eradication of “Jew diseases”. In due course the Red Army will liberate the house so that it becomes first a site of paediatric care, then a tourist attraction. The wonder is that von Abt’s work endures, its singular beauty no bar to utility.

Binding these latter episodes together is Hana, Mawer’s real heroine, who perceives that happiness is as transitory as orgasm and that one must take one’s pleasure where one can. Possibly Mawer makes such wisdom sound too rarefied and class-specific. Lanik, the Landauer’s plebeian chauffeur who becomes caretaker to the evacuated house, is scorned by Hana as “Good Soldier Svejk”, and his sceptical view of his masters (outwardly “respectable types”, forever “going at it hammer and tongs”) underscores his vulgarity. Still, he’s not far wrong.

But if The Glass Room feels airless at times, its poetic success is to remind us of two great gilt-edged ironies: that whatever is held to be the height of modernity is already en route to the museum, and that even “cold” art is the embodiment of its maker’s passion – one that can prove contagious.

Richard T Kelly is author of ‘The Crusaders’ (Faber)