2022/67: The Glass Hotel -- Emily St John Mandel

[tamaranth]

2022/67: The Glass Hotel -- Emily St John Mandel

She’d never believed in love at first sight but she did believe in recognition at first sight, she believed in understanding upon meeting someone for the first time that they were going to be important in her life, a sensation like recognizing a familiar face in an old photograph: in a sea of faces that mean nothing, one comes into focus. You. [p. 123]

The eponymous hotel is a glass-and-cedar construction on a remote island in British Columbia. Vincent Smith (female) tends bar; Jonathan Alkaitis, financier, owns the hotel; Vincent's brother Paul works at the hotel. One night, shipping executive Leon Prevant checks in, and is shocked to see a threatening message scrawled in acid on the glass. How these four people relate to one another -- betrayal and theft, love and hatred, ghosts and lies -- is the matter of the novel. The Glass Hotel is mostly set in 2008, and thus it's perhaps no surprise that the financial crash looms large, not only in the background but in the foreground. (I learnt more about Ponzi schemes than I had expected.)

I read this immediately after Sea of Tranquility, though did not enjoy it as much: there are some fantastical elements -- at least two characters are haunted by the dead, literally and metaphorically -- but it's more claustrophobic, less hopeful, less compassionate. I found the characters fascinating, if sometimes naive and sometimes mercenary, and I endorse the importance of art and beauty: but despite the splendid prose and the intriguing hints of the preternatural, this just didn't engage me as much as Sea of Tranquility.

I hadn't realised that Mandel reuses characters. (Multiverse of Mandel? I think some characters also appear in Station Eleven, in different forms.) Vincent is mentioned in Sea of Tranquility: Paul's a character in both novels, as is Vincent's friend Mirella. There are other echoes and resonances, such as the graffiti on the wall of a prison cell, and the 5-minute videos that Vincent starts making as a lonely teenager. And one character has a 'counterlife', which seems to have become a reality in the later Sea of Tranquility. Though The Glass Hotel didn't really engage me, I still want to read more Mandel, if only to see what other lives these characters might have lived.