The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel
I would like to thank Pan Macmillan for an advance copy of this novel in exchange for a fair and honest review
Publisher – Pan MacMillan
Published – Out Now
Price - £14.99 Hardcover £8.99 Kindle eBook
Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent's half brother, Paul, scrawls a note on a windowed wall of the hotel: Why don't you swallow broken glass. Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company named Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship. Weaving together the lives of these characters, The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.
Whenever an actor plays a villain, they tend to say they play their role as someone who sees themselves as the hero. This is always an interesting sounding statement but sometimes you do have to question really you don’t think murder, theft and treachery are pushing things a bit? Perhaps deep down they know the line was crossed a long time ago? In The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel we look at some of the villains of the 2008 financial crisis and what they may have known about. It’s managed to be both an enchanting and also frustratingly opaque read.
This novel weaves through time but we start with a young woman named Vincent plunging into icy water in 2018 then jumping back in time to 1994 where we meet Paul a partly recovering drug addict in Toronto sullenly trying to turn his life around. An effort to impress a young woman goes tragically wrong and he runs to hide from any consequences with his estranged sister Vincent.
We flash forward, and then find the Hotel Caiette, a beautiful isolated hotel in the wilderness famous for its glass walls where you can see out into the night from your comfortable chairs. Here both Paul and Vincent have service positions and trouble comes when a mysterious threatening message gets written on a wall leading to accusations and resignations. Finally, we follow the strange final years of Jonathan Alkatis extremely rich financier; for whom Vincent becomes his not quite trophy wife. Alkatis excels at selling to many people dreams of fortunes unheard of and yet deep down he knows the clock is also ticking for him. All these lives and many more we meet are connected through time and slowly we will find out exactly what happened on that night at sea.
I found this a puzzling read. On the positive side I really could not put it down once I started. Mandel is as we know from Station Eleven an enchanting storyteller and this story has brilliant hooks. From Vincent’s fall into the depths of a sea to the mystery of why Alkatis ends in jail (all hinted at in one of the early fast-forwards) we are given as readers a huge tangle of mysteries to unravel. Mandel’s use of language and structure here is brilliant. In some ways the weaving of past and future definitely echo Station Eleven’s format and how this novel makes time flow back and forth, so we examine key elements that lead to the futures we have seen is once again mesmerising. The overall atmosphere here is of people haunted by the ghosts of the past and future. Be they Paul’s fears of his crime in Toronto; Vincent’s feelings of abandonment by her mother who disappeared many years ago or even Alkatis’ being haunted by his victims in jail. This is a novel where everyone expects the hammer to eventually fall and they know their joy is not everlasting and perhaps they can never truly embrace it. There is a brilliant set of scenes where we watch a Ponzi scheme crew in their final 24 hours before arrests start and watching these people react to the news that it is finally over is an intriguing study I human behaviour as we see guilt; relief, anger, practicality or pure confusion. We often meet characters who only serve one act’s purpose, but they haunt the rest of the book.
Where I had issues with the story was its main theme – everyone is guilty of bending the rules. As an example, we meet Olivia who many years ago painted Alkatis’ brother who was a drug addict. She exposed his human frailty to the world; and it became her best-selling picture. Later on, she invests her money in Alkatis’ schemes. Innocent or guilty? With Vincent we see someone who decides to be Alkatis’ pretend wife and enjoy life in what she ends up calling the Kingdom on Money but her friendships and attachments are all fleeting and when she escapes that life she finds those she knew best no longer recognise her. I liked the exploration that the people who do these things are fully aware they are committing crimes and hurting people but end up prioritising their own lifestyle for themselves or loved ones first as that helped the reader understand why people carried past that point of no return.
I think the novels falls down though when Mandel tries to put forward that everyone is fully aware of these boundaries and is complicit in them. There is a disquieting idea that Alkatis’ victims like Olivia deep down knew this wasn’t real and they enjoyed the dividends so in some ways the eventual bankruptcy isn’t really unexpected – it makes it seem a middle class inconvenience and forgets the many working class people who lost their homes and livelihoods. This worries me as Ponzi schemes are made by experts in selling dreams and targeting the weak. I was hoping for a greater examination of why people got so fascinated with wealth – capitalism could just as easily be seen as a Ponzi scheme leading to the 2008 crash and I thought this would be better explored but overall I felt the target was missed.
I definitely want to read more of Mandel’s work. That style of storytelling and approach even in this novel was just a joy to savour and explore how it is done. But in this case the themes felt curiously off target and my overall feeling at the end was of a missed opportunity. It is an interesting read but not one I think that really captures why the last decade was so painful for so many.
