Like The Bookseller, The Glass Forest is set in the past: the "present day" portion of the novel in 1960, with flashbacks covering the previous twenty years. It is told from the point of view of three women, whose lives are affected by a pair of handsome and charming brothers, Paul and Henry Glass. The book opens with Angie, Paul's young wife, answering a long-distance call from Ruby, Henry's teenaged daughter, delivering the message that Henry is dead and her mother, Henry's wife Silja, is missing.
The book is a definite page-turner -- I started and finished it on the same day -- but I wasn't far into it before I had the suspicion that this was one of those books, like Wuthering Heights, where everything interesting has already happened before the narrative began but everyone's life is going to end up ruined in a delayed reaction anyway.
Apart from Angie and Silja, the characters are rather flat and two-dimensional. Ruby is something of an enigma to the very end, undoubtedly a conscious choice by the author to build tension, but the pay-off falls flat to me. The Glass brothers, too are opaque: Henry goes off to war and comes back utterly changed: why exactly? Never explained. Paul has an affair with a woman demonstrated by every other part of the story to be not at all his type: why? Likewise no explanation of his behavior. The bad guys are of the black-hatted, moustache-twirling variety. Why do they do the awful things they do? Apparently just because they're bad guys. I kept expecting some sort of revelation in backstory or explanation of their motives that would elucidate their character, but they stubbornly remained cardboard cut-outs with no apparent goal other than sociopathy.
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