The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel (2020)
“We got through the end of the world,” she said, but when he looked over his shoulder, she was sleeping and he wondered if he’d imagined it. Melissa was red-eyed and speedy, driving too fast, talking about her new job selling clothes at Le Chateau while Paul only half-listened, and somewhere on the drive back to their apartment he found himself seized by a strange, manic kind of hope. It was a new century. If he could survive the ghost of Charlie Wu, he could survive anything. It had rained at some point in the night and the sidewalks were gleaming, water reflecting the morning’s first light.
I’ve been keeping a record of my reading for around eight years now. Nothing elaborate, just the books and their publication dates and a brief, informal summary of my overall impressions. I also award each book read a mark out of ten, for my eyes only of course, and again for no other purpose than to remind me of how I responded to the book at the time of reading.
The Glass Hotel is my first 10/10 book of 2020. I find this objectively interesting because I’ve read some great books so far this year, some of them good enough to award nines to. But that ten mark for me has to be a signifier not just of literary excellence but something extra, that indefinable quality of gut-punch, the sense that I have read something that will remain a part of my personal literary landscape for a long time to come.
These are my notes for The Glass Hotel, written almost immediately after I turned the final page:
This had a similar effect on me to reading Mark Haddon’s The Porpoise in that it is such a well made, professionally written, imaginatively vast, gorgeously surprising book, the kind that does not depend for one moment on flashy effects or tricks or forced innovation, just the best kind of unshowy, rock-solid writing that timelessly immersive fiction can allow. Both books also have powerfully moving endings, but that’s a side-issue! [It occurs to me only now that there is also the element of water, ever present in both The Porpoise and The Glass Hotel, that draws these two novels together.] I loved literally every page of this. It does my heart good to see a writer who pays such careful attention to her craft, who treats her vocation with the seriousness it deserves. My first 10/10 book of the year, which has been a while coming but I never doubted it would. Stupendous.
I can only imagine how strange it must feel for Mandel right now, with her new book just out and everyone so intently focused on her previous. In terms of her visibility as an author, Station Eleven was a game-changer for Mandel. However, she wisely rejects the idea that the novel was in any way prescient – the research she undertook in the process of writing the book made it clear to her that pandemics, like earthquakes, have always been with us, and always will be. For Mandel, Station Eleven was simply her next book. It took her two years to write. The Glass Hotel has taken her around five years, and according to Mandel’s most recent interviews has undergone many transformations and revisions. One of the difficulties she speaks of – and perhaps the chief manner in which it differs from its predecessor – is the problem she has found in defining the book for purposes of publicity. The marketing departments of publishers are understandably eager for a book to have an elevator pitch, a couple of swift, pithy sentences that simultaneously sum up what the novel is about, and convey something of the experience of reading it.
It is close to impossible to describe The Glass Hotel in these terms, a fact that, for me at least, would seem to convey something of its depth and complexity. Is it a crime story? Is it a ghost story? It is both, and neither, and more. I can only hope its refusal to be defined, coupled with the trying and disappointing circumstances into which it has had the misfortune to be published, will not prevent readers from discovering it, savouring it, remembering that it exists. Will it win as many fans and plaudits as Station Eleven? Possibly not, though to my mind it is even more praise-worthy (not to mention prize-worthy). What it does do, without a doubt, is cement Mandel’s reputation as a writer who means business. The Glass Hotel is a thing of beauty, hovering at so many moments on the brink of being truly profound.
*
The glass hotel of the title is to be found close to the small town of Caiette, on a remote promontory of Vancouver Island. The hotel is accessible only by boat, a luxury retreat that attracts only the richest and most discerning of clientele. As such, it would seem to be the ideal venue for a classic whodunit of the Golden Age school. In fact, the crime story Mandel has in store for us could not be more different.
At the hotel we meet Vincent, a disaffected young woman who works as a bartender and still grieving the death of her mother some years before. Her half-brother Paul is also working at the hotel. Unlike Vincent, he hates the place, and can’t wait to get away. He keeps seeing ghosts – or one ghost in particular, the spirit of Charlie Wu, a musician who died from taking a drug that Paul supplied. The owner of the hotel, Jonathan Alkaitis – aloof, secretive and terribly rich – has warned the staff of the presence of another guest, Ella Kaspersky, with whom he does not wish to come into contact while he is staying there.
Paul meets Ella, Vincent meets Jonathan. The Glass Hotel is in a sense the story of the echoes and repercussions of these two life-changing meetings. It is no secret that Mandel has based the story of Jonathan Alkaitis on the story of the rise and calamitous fall of criminal financier Bernie Madoff, and this knowledge adds an extra layer of potency to her narrative. We know in advance where Alkaitis will end up, but this in no way diminishes the power and horror of the multiple stories behind the headlines.
He never noticed dandelions before he came here, but in the oppressive blankness of the yard, those little bursts of yellow on the grass are almost shocking. Likewise, the birds. They’re the kind of birds that blend into the landscape on the outside, just robins and ravens and finches and such, but here there’s something extraordinary about the way they alight on the grass and then leave again, flitting in and out of bounds. They are emissaries from another world. The prison rulebook prohibits feeding them, but some guys surreptitiously drop crumbs on the grass.
Mandel’s ‘office chorus’ – the massed voices of those who work for Alkaitis and enable his crimes – not only reveal the scope of the crime in greater detail, they remind us at every turn of our own potential complicity. Not in this crime maybe but in some other, at another time, in another place. Maybe our own moral weaknesses and failures will not land us in jail, yet such moments will haunt our lives, nonetheless. All that is needed for evil to prosper is for good people to do nothing.
In a ghost version of his life, a version of himself that he’d been thinking about more and more lately, Oskar closed the door to his office and called the FBI.
But in real life, he called no one. He left the office in a daze, but by the time he reached the corner he realized that he couldn’t pretend to be shocked, and he knew he was going to deposit the cheque, because he was already complicit, he was already on the inside and had been for some time. ‘You already knew this,’ he heard himself murmuring, speaking aloud. ‘There are no surprises here. You know what you are.’
Mandel has referred to The Glass Hotel as a ghost story, and she is fascinated by the concept of parallel realities – Vincent dares to imagine a world in which the Georgia Flu becomes a pandemic, for example, a subtle nod to fans of Station Eleven. But in exploring these ideas, she seems more drawn to the imaginative power of the concept, rather than the explicitly science fictional ‘what ifs’ we see elaborated upon in more conventional approaches.
What lies at the heart of The Glass Hotel is a recognition of the frailty of the now, the million ways in which characters – that is to say, us – can be jolted out of one life and into another. One of Alkaitis’s investors (again, readers of Station Eleven may have reason to believe they’ve met him before) finds himself catapulted literally overnight from a position of prosperity and privilege into what he comes to think of as the shadow country, a United States in which people work tiring jobs for low wages, live out of camper vans and try to avoid thinking about what might happen to them if they or one of their family happens to fall ill.
This world is his life now. The fact that hits him hardest is that this world was always there, and yet he never saw it.
As a crime novel, The Glass Hotel is an electrifying dramatisation of a particular moment in history. For those of us who remember these events as news headlines, the book effortlessly captures the frenetic, almost hyper-real atmosphere of the years leading up to the financial crash of 2008. Those who weren’t there will find this story equally compelling – like all great novels, The Glass Hotel can be perfectly understood without any prior knowledge of its source material. As text, it is close to perfect, which gives it 10/10 from me.
(You can read another interview with Mandel here, and listen to an excellent podcast interview with her here, exploring the inspirations behind The Glass Hotel as well as Mandel’s writing process and love of ghost stories.)