Glass by Alex Christofi (Serpents Tail, 12.99)

Glass by Alex Christofi (Serpents Tail, 12.99)

POPULATED with ambiguous characters, Glass is a pretty confident and frequently adroit first novel from Alex Christofi.

In it, the young Gunter Glass lives up to his surname in a Tom Jones-like escapade as he pursues a window cleaning career. It takes him ever higher in the architecture of capitalism and he ends up in the upper reaches of Londons Shard.

Recoiling from the death of his mother and the descent of his father into alcoholic self-pity, Glass is talent-spotted by John Blade, a celebrity window cleaner with distinctly fascist sympathies.

Christofis narrative moves from the stuffiness of ecclesiastical Salisbury to Boris Johnsons London, replete with its all too obvious contradictions and extremes of poverty and wealth.

Yet, unlike Henry Fieldings hero Tom Jones, Glass remains something of a naive young man throughout. As he plaintively says of himself: I didnt seem to be able to understand events until after theyd occurred.

The material glass acts as a constant metaphor for an uncertainly defined object that can distort as much as it can faithfully reflect an accurate view of the world.

Christofi comes across as a pretty clever chap and hes obviously well-read in European literature. Yet hes maybe too ambitious in showing off his literary and historical knowledge and this occasionally threatens to overwhelm the novel.

Aside from the nod to German novelist Gunter Grass, Christofi offers us insights into the Cagoule movement a French fascist terror group in the 1930s and gives us the Steppenwolf, a rather feral writer living in a cork-lined room. Its all a bit redolent of Herman Hesse and Marcel Proust for dummies.

The book also introduces a new punctuation mark the interrobang which is a combined question and exclamation mark, qualifying a sentence that seems like a question but invites no answer.

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Glass by Alex Christofi (Serpents Tail, 12.99)