The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

 I am guessing like many others, my book ‘Wish List’ is often informed by some reviews which pique my interest. That was certainly the case with The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel. To that end, I was delighted when my other half bought it as part of a seriously excellent book haul for my birthday back in September.  However, then I started to see it on a lot of people’s ‘Top Picks of the Year for 2020’ or other similar types of list and I began to twitch a little because I have lost count of the number of times I have read something because it was one of these end of year roundups and then been wildly disappointed that the reality didn’t lead up to the hype on the list. I know that sounds like a bit of insane troll logic because I put it on my wish list because of reviews and surely an end of year list is just another type of review? Well, both yes and no, at least in my mind. So, before I get into my thoughts on The Glass Hotel, bear with me and I’ll attempt to explain where my brain is at on this.

A review is a reader/reviewer’s opinion and for the most part it is about their experience with that book. Did they enjoy it? Were the characters engaging? Was it well written? Would they recommend it? They might compare it to other books the author has written or to others in the same or similar genre, but in the main a review is about how they got on with that book. An ‘End of Year List’ (note caps because it feels like it should have caps!) always feels like it is carrying a lot more weight and baggage. It is still one person’s experience and perception, but they are weighing it against the myriad other books they have read that year in goodness knows how many genres and saying that this book, or this number of books resonated and spoke to them in a way that rose above the shitload of others that have crossed their path during the year. That is a lot to put on a book and it creates a wave of expectation that can be hard to live up to.

I should say that I know I’m being slightly unfair because both single reviews and end of year lists are all about the perception of an individual, and not only that, how they’re feeling at that point in time can impact how they experience a book, because god knows I’ve sometimes hated a brilliant book one year and loved it the next, or vice versa and it’s all been down to my mood when I read it.

Anyway, I’m glad I cleared that up, or at least got it out of my system, so on to my thoughts on this particular book.

I am thrilled to say that I loved The Glass Hotel and read it over two long lazy afternoons because sometimes reading in the time of COVID is a pleasure when you have the right book and this was a real pleasure to read. It is intelligent, excellently written, well plotted, thoughtful, with three dimensional, well drawn characters that I believed and was engaged with even when I didn’t really like them.

Our main protagonist is Vincent (who is a girl, just to clear that up) who we first meet bartending in the remote high-end Hotel Caiette sited off the west coast of Vancouver Island (the fact that one of the main locations is the Island obviously caught my attention when I read the reviews given that I live here!). We also meet Jonathan Alkaitis, the owner of the hotel and a high-flying investment broker in New York. The main action starts when a threatening piece of graffiti is discovered etched into one of the hotel windows then swiftly moves to New York where a year later Vincent is living as Jonathan’s wife and enjoying a life where credit card bills are nothing to worry about.

 I use the phrase ‘living as Jonathan’s wife’ advisedly as this is a book about deception and self-deception. Vincent isn’t really his wife and Jonathan is actually running a huge Ponzi scheme, a deception that inevitably comes crashing down on his head and the heads of his co-conspirators. I should say that none of this is a spoiler as this is basically the summary that is on the fly leaf of the book.

The rest of the book delves into the before and after of the Ponzi scheme collapse, not only in how it effects Vincent and Jonathan, but how it effects the lives of the other characters who invested. What I liked is that all the characters have a purpose and every time we meet one it advances the story without ever feeling like they were crowbarred in just to make a plot point.

There’s a telling quote early in the book when the hotel’s manager tells one of his staff “Our guests at Caiette want to come to the wilderness, but they don’t want to be in the wilderness. They just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel.” Those words kept circling in my head as I read this book – the feeling that the characters are living in the spaces between worlds - looking at an eco-system without being part of it, of being in it, but not experiencing it, whether that eco-system is the lush rain forest wilderness of Vancouver Island or the monied circles in New York. It’s as if by keeping themselves at one remove from their environment they are not responsible for their actions within it.

This feeling is amplified by some of the metaphors the author uses. Once Jonathan is in prison for his misdeeds he muses on having a 'ghost-life' where he’s actually in a hotel in Dubai still enjoying the high life. One of his investors who loses everything and finishes up travelling the US in an RV thinks about how he is now living in the 'shadow country', that space where people work for cash in hand and become the type of invisible worker that the person he used to be, used to look right through.

Given this idea of the spaces between worlds, it feels fitting that the story also involves a mystery of what happens to Vincent when she disappears from a ship between one port and the next. The idea of a ship being the ultimate in liminal space, flying under a flag of convenience and never actually belonging to any country it visits really appealed to me and felt like it fitted brilliantly with the whole feeling of experiencing a world at one step removed.

The story also plays with the idea of ‘knowing and not knowing at the same time.’ The Ponzi co-conspirators know they are involved in a criminal enterprise, but somehow they have managed to push that knowledge to the back of their mind. Vincent’s brother has appropriated some of videos Vincent filmed as a hobby and used it to kick start his career in music, but he manages to justify it to himself that she’d left them behind and didn’t want them. The person who is responsible for the graffiti on the hotel window knows what they did but has never really thought about the impact of their actions. As I said at the start, it is all about deception and self-deception and the ghosts of the past sliding in and out of the present and shaping the characters’ futures. In the hands of an author less capable than Emily St. John Mandel all this sleight of hand could have been trite and tiring, but in my opinion at least, it is wonderfully handled and I couldn’t wait to see what might happen next. The unexpected linkages between the characters at various stages of their lives feel earned and not just plot devices and again that is down to the skill of the writer and the lure of the story she is telling.

I should say that all the themes I’ve highlighted are my interpretation of what I read, because as I said at the start about reviews, a book is all about the reader’s perception of the story and this review is mine and my perceptions. Someone else might read it very differently.

If you have got this far and aren’t asleep yet, I’ll repeat again, I thought The Glass Hotel was brilliant.  I know it’s something I’ll read again, and definitely a book I’d gladly recommend.

 

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel was first published in 2020 and my copy was published by Harper Collins.