Henk's Reviews > The Glass Hotel

An interconnected tale of people drifting between the late capitalistic lands of money and shadows
”Small world”
“The smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me.”

Money and (a)morality
It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet.
Emily St. John Mandel weaves an interconnected tale around Vincent (a girl) and Paul, half siblings growing up on a remote island in the vicinity of Vancouver.
Both experience trauma, Vincent due to her mother leaving on kayak and never returning and Paul through his struggle with drugs addiction and collateral damage from this.
The Glass Hotel of the title unites them again after their childhood; a five star private retreat in the wilderness and the only employer in the neighbourhood. Vincent leaves her bartender role to date with the owner of the hotel, but soon something fishy concerning Jonathan Alkaitis (But what kind of man lies to his daughter about being married?) becomes clear.
Here one of the key theme of the book comes into focus, how (the lure of) money corrupts.
Vincent caughts herself thinking: Lying about being married troubled her conscience, but not enough to make her want to flee. I’m paying a price for this life, she told herself, but the price is reasonable.
The other key theme of St. John Mandel is how people struggle with the realization that they are less ethical and principled than they like to be on a conceptual level.

And the prize of this tension between knowing but not acting is steep in the end.
Not only does the following thought pass Vincent her mind, between all the cocktail parties, shopping and meetings where she acts the trophy wife (I was having one of those moments, where you look at your life and think, Is this really it? I thought there’d be more.) but the financial crisis of 2008 impacts her life as well, driving her to sea.

When the ponzi scheme comes crashing down, the focus on the morality of seemingly ordinary people comes even more in the foreground. Seemingly small choices, to accept a bonus for silence, the comfort of money, in the end pulls a lot of people towards a jail sentence. How Emily St. John Mandel portrays the characters realising this, and then coping with that knowledge, is very well done. You get perspective on the impact of the collapse, with people ending up evicted and living in a car as working poor or even suicides. Finance is far from abstract in this manner.

The supernatural and guilt
There is an exquisite lightness in waking up each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.
Paul meanwhile is troubled by his past, and seemingly supernatural ghost sightings (The lights were so bright that it was possible to be certain that he hadn’t actually seen a ghost.), something that ends up being seen as well by the lover of Vincent. It can be interpreted as a play on alternative universes, regret and grief, if one does not want to see this in a Stephen King kind of way.

Paul ends up being a thief to his half sister, in a way that felt quite invasive even though it was not a physical theft. None of the characters is solely good or uncorrupted in the interconnected narrative the author spins. Not many even survive, it seems, if one summarizes after finishing the book.

The modern interconnected world portrayed skilfully
In the Glass Hotel everyone knows (or meets) everyone. This is reminiscent to Station Eleven that followed all the people who knew an actor.
A character from the shipping industry makes a cameo from Station Eleven, and there are some musings on a Georgia flue that thankfully was stopped.

The timescale of the book is decades, in which we go back and forth associatively, so in part this interconnectedness can be called convincing. But in my opinion this book had a much more constructed feel then its predecessor.
In a sense it is impressive how Mandel captures the complex modern world, and of course a lot of chance together is statistics, but I missed sometimes emotional gravity or a forceful drive.

This is a well written novel, but after the five star read of Station Eleven I'd expected more when starting the Glass Hotel.