Glass
by Alex Christofi
(Serpent’s 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 London’s 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.

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

Yet, unlike Henry Fielding’s hero Tom Jones, Glass remains something of a naive young man throughout. As he plaintively says of himself: “I didn’t seem to be able to understand events until after they’d 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 he’s obviously well-read in European literature. Yet he’s 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. It’s 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.

While the novel sags somewhat in the middle, with Glass regressing into an Adrian Mole-like mindset of banal hopelessness, it’s never short of beautifully crafted descriptions. While attending a window-cleaning masterclass, Glass feels “lobotomised with knowledge,” while the Steppenwolf rails against the “tinnitus of existence.”

Glass is an enjoyably mercurial and quixotic novel and, while Christofi doesn’t quite reach the top of his literary skyscraper, he hasn’t got far to climb to reach the summit of something really impressive in the years ahead.

Paul Simon