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Morris West's latest work is not just a popular novel. It can be highly recommended to psychoanalysts and psychotherapists of all schools and persuasions.
In less than two pages (pp. 122f.) of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, C. G. Jung (1961) recalls a consultation he once had with a well-to-do woman, formerly a doctor, who came anonymously wishing to confess a murder she had committed in order to marry her husband. Jung never found out who she was, wasn't entirely certain whether her story was true, and wondered what happened to her as a result of her “utter loneliness,” This is the cameo from which the Australian-born West, well known for many earlier novels including The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Devil's Advocate, derives the plot of The World is Made of Glass.
The novel is set in 1913, a time when Jung was breaking with Freud, when Jung was involved in his affair with Toni Wolff, and when Europe was experiencing the preamble to the Great War.
The outline of the plot is simple. In alternating chapters of first-person narrative Magda (the “patient”) and Jung relate the events of their lives prior to the consultation. Continuing the same literary device West lets us experience the consultation through words spoken between patient and analyst, as well as through the thoughts and fantasies now of Magda, now of Jung. Finally we see Magda as she leaves the consultation. West however does not end here where Jung was forced to conclude his account in Memories, Dreams, Reflections. So we follow Magda after her return to Paris.
The book has the pace of a fine thriller and the excitement of a good mystery.
As a background there is a mosaic of surprisingly accurate historical details from Jung's life, his relationships with his wife and children, his relationship with Toni Wolff, the onset of his “creative illness,” and even the physical aspects of his house including, for example, the symbolic inscription above its main door: Vocatus atque non vocatus Deus aderit (Called or