Our second Mandel book in in as many months, but will The Glass Hotel be as good as Station Eleven?
The Glass Hotel – the blurb
Vincent is the beautiful bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it’s the beginning of their life together. That same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the windowed wall of the hotel: ‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass.’ Leon Prevant, a shipping executive for a company called Neptune-Avramidis, sees the note from the hotel bar and is shaken to his core. Thirteen years later Vincent mysteriously disappears from the deck of a Neptune-Avramidis ship.
Weaving together the lives of these characters, Emily St. John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the towers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of our pasts.
Got to bump it up
I loved Station Eleven. So much that when a copy of Mandel’s new book came into my hands I bumped it to the front of my TBR pile. The Glass Hotel has all the hallmarks of Station Eleven yet is totally different. There are numerous characters that drift in and out of the text, as they do through their lives. The characters drag you with them through alternate realities, memories and current day. They don’t outwardly connect with each other, yet they all do in some slight not always obvious way. There is even a nod to Station Eleven which I muchly appreciated.
In The Glass Hotel we have no apocalypse, no Georgian Flu, just a brother and sister trying to make it through a confusing life that leaves them both unfulfilled. There were repeated references to glass: how transparent it is; how easy it is to shatter; how hard to put back together. And to water: a constant presence; a sinister taker of life; a way to cleanse. There was also several references to ships and I couldn’t help drawing conclusions, from having read Station Eleven so recently, that the ships Mandel refers to in The Glass Hotel are the ones Miranda watches from the beach in Station Eleven. Am I right? What’s the shipping connection to Mandel, anyone know?
A need to be anchored
I love Mandel’s style of writing. You have to concentrate otherwise it can take you unawares and you miss something. I’m not sure whether The Glass Hotel will stay with me for as long as Station Eleven has/is (that plane!) but it’s one I will be mulling over in the coming days. Greed, wealth, happiness, fulfilment, the need to be anchored (another shipping reference!) It would make a fab book club book as I bet there are loads of different things that people pick up on. Do let us know on social media if your book club is reading it.
Just look at the gorgeous covers for The Glass House. Which one will you get?