First published in The Times on 25 July 2020
In the spring the Canadian author Emily St John Mandel enjoyed an odd bit of fortune: there was a resurgence of sales of her acclaimed 2014 novel, Station Eleven, a tale of life after a pandemic that wipes out 99 per cent of the population. I don’t feel much like reading that this year, but her new novel, The Glass Hotel, is thankfully less close to home: an elegant, haunting story that ties together the shipping industry, the 2008 financial crisis and a host of characters experiencing various levels of loss and anguish.
I classified it as a thriller at first, in part thanks to its eerie cover, but it turns out to be something more nuanced: although we start with a woman falling from a ship, and end by finding out how she went overboard, the death ultimately is almost peripheral. Mandel introduces a large cast with their own well-realised preoccupations. They include Paul, whom we meet as an unhappy student encountering a bad batch of Ecstasy in a Toronto club; his sister Vincent, who enters into the Faustian pact of being a trophy wife; and Leon, who is bewitched by his job in shipping, the never-ending routes of tankers lighting up in his imagination like a web.
I was so absorbed by each of their perspectives that I was bereft then to have them drift in and out of the novel, as every character does, and indeed the way the narrative hops between locations, people and moments in time may try the patience of some readers. But Mandel’s storytelling is imaginative, and eventually a Ponzi scheme emerges at the heart of her story, run by a company of men and women who want to believe themselves to be good people, even as they wait for their prison sentences.
Mandel explores again and again the idea of the metaphorical countries that we occupy: Vincent, for a brief spell, lives in “the country of money”, where a staff of servants meet her every need; her primary duty is to be beautiful and untroubling for her wealthy partner. A man thrown into destitution by the Ponzi scheme finds himself tuning in to a hitherto unnoticed country of vagrants and the poor — drifting men who work at fairgrounds, and thin, young girls who do a different kind of work in Las Vegas hotel rooms.
The Glass Hotel of the title is a luxury destination, remote in the wilderness of Vancouver Island, that links many of these characters; the creepiness of the hotel, surrounded by dark water and rustling forest, is perhaps the most conventional thing about this novel. Throughout the book people see ghosts and visions, but Mandel never indulges fully in the supernatural; instead, it’s a unique rumination on guilt, grief and regret.
The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel, Picador, 320pp, £14.99