The Glass Hotel - Emily St. John Mandel

When I decided to reserve this book on my library app, I only knew 2 things about it. One: it was by the same author as Sea of Tranquility, which I absolutely devoured in 24 hours and wouldn't shut up about for weeks. Two: that many people who have read that book recommend reading this one first as, although it is in no way a sequel, amongst Sea of Tranquility's rather large cast of characters we find three characters from The Glass Hotel two years after their story there has ended. Had I known that there were no sci-fi elements and that the main storyline was centred around the 2008 financial crash, there is absolutely no way I would have picked it up. But god, I'm so glad I did.

When I say plot, I use that word loosely. This story is told in a very non-linear format, flitting back and forth in time from as early as 1998 to a short vignette in 2029, but our main focus is from 2005-2009. We follow Vincent, a young woman who has had a bit of a troubled start in life, meeting multimillionaire Jonathan Alkaitis and how she ends up posing as his wife. A strange event happens that night. Just before Jonathan walked into the Hotel Caiette, someone in an oversized hoodie scrawled on the window in acid marker "Why don't you swallow broken glass". We see how Vincent's life changes after meeting Jonathan and becoming a citizen of 'the kingdom of money' and how it all comes crashing down once his asset management company is revealed to be a Ponzi scheme and he is arrested. Years later, Vincent disappears off the deck of a ship, never to be seen again.

Emily St. John Mandel's writing style is often cold, really emphasising the loneliness of the places she describes. The eponymous Glass Hotel, the Hotel Caiette, is located in the Canadian wilderness. The village of Caiette has no phone signal, one road with two dead ends and is only accessible by boat. Vincent's version of New York comes across as desolate, despite Vincent talking about all the people around her. The background noise gets filtered away, allowing you to really focus on those key details that will definitely come in handy later when you're trying to piece everything together.

Despite the book's central character being Vincent, I thought Mandel's craft really shone in the chapters titled "The Counterlife" and "The Office Chorus". These chapters detail Jonathan's experiences in prison and his employees' experiences leading up to and following the FBI bust at the company respectively. The Counterlife chapters show the imaginary world Jonathan creates to escape the existential dread of a 170-year prison sentence bleeding into his real life and him seeing the ghosts of the people who have died as a result of his actions. Stellar. The Office Chorus chapters are told from the first person plural (aka 'we') point of view of Jonathan's staff as his Ponzi scheme. We flick between Simone, his secretary who had no idea what was going on, and the 'investors' Oskar, Enrico, Joelle and Harvey, who absolutely did. I've never seen a writer employ this technique before and this merging of self and the possibility it gave to flick between characters at lightning speed was incredibly interesting. One of the characters makes a comment about how Jonathan's way of getting people involved was really clever, because by the time each new person fully understood the scope of what The Arrangement was, they were already enmeshed in this group of colleagues and they knew that by saying anything to anyone they would be throwing their colleagues in prison. I really think this choice of first person plural helps the reader get into this team mindset, the unwillingness to throw your colleagues under the bus, especially if you're being paid boat loads of money to keep quiet.

I think my favourite thing about Mandel's writing in this book is her ability to give you a tidbit, wait just long enough that you've almost forgotten what you were told, and then be slammed in the face with the significance of it. One of my standout favourite moments from the book is Simone going home to her flatmates and telling them all about the arrests and what was going on, her flatmates saying something to the effect of "you'll be telling this story at a cocktail party in twenty years" and then in a few chapter's time, we get a very short vignette of a chapter set in 2029 of Simone at a cocktail party telling the story of how she worked at an asset management company that turned out to be a Ponzi scheme that made the news. Would the story have suffered plot-wise or structurally if this moment wasn't there? No. Did I gasp when I realised that was what was happening? Absolutely. A beautiful little sprinkle that I adored.

I mentioned at the beginning that some of the characters from this book appear in Sea of Tranquility. I really enjoyed having read that book first, even though it was technically spoilers, as it kept me interested during parts that were otherwise a little boring. I was not a fan of the chapters near the beginning where we were following Paul. Although now I have read the whole book I understand the relevance of them, at the time I wasn't overly keen. Knowing what happened to him and Vincent later, and also what happened to Mirella and Faisal when they were introduced made me intrigued to know how we got from Point A to Point B and like I had insider information that kept me reading on. I do think it would be interesting to reread Sea of Tranquility now not just for the 2020 narrative with Paul and Mirella, but also now that Caiette feels like a more concrete place in my mind, Edwin St Andrew's chapters might have more intrigue and gravitas. I was truly astounded how characters from a literary fiction novel could fit seamlessly into a sci-fi novel and not have it feel like an awkward Disney Channel Originals cross over episode.

This book is about what money can do to people and what it can make them do, how our pasts can haunt us and how the world is smaller than we think. Despite the fact that I said I wasn't the biggest fan of Paul's early chapters, I gave this book 5 Stars. If you want a bit of a wilcard, this is the book for you