THE WORLD IS MADE OF GLASS - Book review - ADULT CONTENT

 

Morris West’s novel The World is Made of Glass was published in 1983. I was studying psychology in the early 1980s (Open University) and bought this since it was a fictional account of one of Carl Gustav Jung’s case histories. I’ve only now got round to reading it!

West was inspired by a very brief and incomplete record of a case in Jung’s autobiographical work Memories, Dreams , Reflections. As West states in his Note: ‘every novelist is a myth-maker. He quotes Jung: ‘I can only make direct statements, only “tell stories”, whether or not the stories are “true” is not the problem. The only question is whether what I tell is my fable, my truth”.’ [Maybe Meghan Markle has read this…!]

The story is told from two viewpoints: Magda Liliane Kardross von Gamsfeld, a beautiful, rich and intelligent woman of dubious morals, and Jung, her psychiatrist.

Jung is married to Emma who is thirty at this time and carrying their fifth child. Jung met her when she was sixteen and wanted to marry her. ‘I loved her then; I love her now; but love is a chameleon word and we humans change colour more quickly than the words we speak’ (p70). These guilt-ridden thoughts relate to his attractive assistant, Antonia Wolff (Toni), who happens to be his mistress.

One of Jung’s beliefs was that synchronicity has psychic foundations. ‘… coincidence, synchronicity, things happening at the same moment in time, without causal connection, but still closely related in nature… in the context of psychic experience’ (p90).

Jung is aware that what he practices is not scientific, ‘Because this sciences of ours, this medicine of the mind, is still in its infancy. The methods are tentative. The procedures are incomplete’ (p127). He’s quite honest with himself some of the time: ‘I lie, too, when it serves my purposes; but then we all lie in one fashion or another because we are not scientists always; we are soothsayers – dealing with arcane symbols and the stuff of dreams’ (p104). ‘My real exploration will be in the undiscovered country of the mind’ (p154).

At this time, 1913, Jung and Freud were at loggerheads and quarrelled professionally, notoriously. It is also when Jung was approaching the beginning of a protracted breakdown. ‘I’m like a leaf tossed in the wind. So, I have no choice but to let myself be swept along by these storms of the subconscious and see where, finally, they drive me’ (p127).

Most of the book is reported speech, either Magda or Jung reminiscing on their troubled past: Jung was raped as a young boy by a family friend; Magda was initiated into sex at an early age, notably incestuously with her father.

There is a battle of wills between the pair – and collateral damage is felt by both Emma and Toni. Symbolism of dreams is paramount to much of Jung’s exploration. Gradually, he learns about a terrible truth that Magda had concealed. This Magda is a figment of West’s imagination and conveyed with great empathy and skill. Inevitably, there are revelations of a sexual nature and sexual obsession and also murder and guilt.

The author’s ability to get into the minds of two disparate yet complementary individuals is a remarkable feat.

West first wrote a play about this relationship, and then followed it with this novel.

The book title is from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Essays: ‘Commit a crime, and the earth is made of glass. Some damning circumstance always transpires.’