Simon Mawer's eighth novel opens with a note of optimism appropriate to the Utopian spirit of the years between the great wars: in 1929 Liesel and Viktor Landauer, a German Czech and an agnostic Jew, go on a lavish honeymoon to Venice, funded by his thriving motorcar business. They bump into Rainer von Abt, a somewhat pretentious though charming architect, or - as he sees it - “poet of light and space and form”, whose bright-eyed ideas strike a chord with Liesel's avant-garde taste in art and Viktor's entrepreneurial spirit.

By the end of their trip they have commissioned von Abt to design their new home in Mêsto: a temple of modernist living, with straight lines, an enormous living room and walls made entirely of glass.

The Glassraum sits at the heart of Mawer's decade-spanning novel - it doesn't move until, towards the end of the narrative, Red Army bombs dig up the surrounding soil. Instead, personal and political histories are reflected, broken and blurred in its dazzling architecture.

Conceived as an enlightened manifesto against the decadence of the previous decade, the building manifests only the transparency of Viktor's emotions when his Viennese mistress Kata, a refugee after the Anschluss, is taken on board as nanny to Liesel's two children. When the Nazis arrive in Mêsto, the Landauers and their entourage try to flee, first to Switzerland and then to America: “six characters in search of a home”, as Mawer calls it, in a slightly clumsy reference to Pirandello.

The ideals of their old home are perverted when it is turned into a laboratory for the Nazi eugenicist Stahl: a scientific modernist in his own right, who searches for the “degenerate gene” in his patients, with a measuring gaze “as perfect as the dimension of the Glass Room itself”. Liesel's old friend Hana Hanáková embarks on an unlikely romance with the scientist but their relationship is jinxed - not until long after the end of the war, when the room turns theatre for an erotic triangle between the surgeon Tomáš, the dancer Zdenka and the journalist Eve, is some of its original magic recaptured.

In one of the early chapters, von Abt claims that the founding moment of modern architecture, the vertical line penetrating the horizontal, always resembles the sexual act, and it comes as no surprise that love triangles litter Mawer's story. They bear witness to his great talent for grasping the non-linear nature of desire.

If there is a problem with his book, it is not that its architecture is “too cold” - as von Abt fears people might think of his building - but that the motives and meanings of his characters are sometimes too crystal clear. Modernist architecture, Freudian psychoanalysis and middle-class angst: so typical of the Mitteleuropean 20th century are the lives of the central pair Liesel and Viktor that one sometimes wonders if we are reading a history book or their proper stories. A few dark corners and dead ends, one feels, would have improved the impressive overall design.

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
Little, Brown, £16.99; 416pp Buy the book

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