You may remember that Terence Rattigan film from 1964, The Yellow Rolls-Royce, which showed us the various scenes witnessed by the eponymous car as it passed from owner to owner. CSForester's novel The Gun once did much the same thing with a Napoleonic artillery piece. The inanimate protagonist makes for a sub-genre of its own, with the salutary virtue of reminding us humans what a bunch of transients we are.

Simon Mawer's thoughtful seventh novel centres on a house in the provincial Czech city of “Mesto” (the Czech word for city). The house is a modernist masterpiece by the fictional architect Rainer von Abt, built in 1930 for a Jewish car manufacturer, Viktor Landauer, and Liesel, his Gentile wife.

The disguise is designedly thin, and when we learn that Mesto is the birthplace of Rainer's mentor Adolf Loos, and that it has a large arms factory, the trail leads straight to Brno, home of the Bren gun, where the local attractions include Mies van der Rohe's Villa Tugendhat, a Unesco world heritage site. Another giveaway is the onyx wall in the main “glass room” of the Landauer House. This is a startling feature of the Villa Tugendhat, and there aren't a lot of houses with onyx walls. Rainer also designs two chairs specially for the Landauers, just as van der Rohe did for the Tugendhats.

Mawer's beautifully realised setting does not overwhelm its fictional inhabitants. He avoids excessive character analysis and lets the Landauers and their circle gradually reveal themselves by their actions, often in convincingly unexpected ways. There is not much plot as such, but once the couple have children and their sex life, although not their devotion, cools, the steady Viktor suddenly finds himself obsessed with Kata, a poor Viennese seamstress-cum-prostitute he meets on a business trip. Liesel meanwhile has a lesbian dalliance with her friend Hana. The rest, to some extent, is history: the rise of the Nazis, the “betrayal” of Munich (Mawer probably doesn't know, as Neville Chamberlain certainly did, that in October 1938 Britain had only five Spitfires, so war wasn't on) and the pressing need for Jews to escape if they could afford all the arrangements.

Mawer's observation can be neat and precise, as when visitors to an architectural exhibition bend to look at the models, “shifting their viewpoints like billiard players preparing a shot”. It doesn't always work, though. Viktor, falling for Kata, knows it is “love, the focused, thermic lance of passion and hunger”, which comes across awkwardly, and not just because the thermic lance won't be invented for another 30 years. When Liesel eventually meets Kata, she feels, unbidden, “a sleek shark of desire”.

Mawer gets rather stuck on sharks. The German fighters landing at Mesto in 1939 “look like sharks”; the abandoned house becomes a Nazi biometric institute, and officials get out of the SS chief Heydrich's way “like fish before a shark” when he visits; his smile is “the smile on the face of a shark”; he closes the institute down, because they can't find enough biometric proof of Jewish degeneracy, and Messerschmitt's engineers move in, working on the new jet, “a shark of a machine”.

With the Landauers gone to America, we have to take more interest in Hana, who stays behind, and then in Tomas and Zdenka, who run the house as a children's physiotherapy unit under post-war communism. As we are well over halfway through, it feels a little late to switch our attention. And Mawer leaves a large loose end untied, concerning the most attractive and sympathethic character in the book, whose wartime fate we are depressingly left to guess.

As the story ends in 1990, with the house a museum, the recent history of the real house does not figure. The Tugendhats have filed for restitution under the law on artworks looted by the Nazis, which will require a legal ruling on whether a house can really be, as von Abt proclaims, a work of art. An intriguing angle missed. But still, Mawer's own work of art is a largely sound and satisfying one

The Glass Room by Simon Mawer
Little, Brown £16.99 pp416.

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