Novel of the week

THE GLASS HOTEL by Emily St John Mandel 320PP, PICADOR, £14.99, EBOOK £8.99

Canadian author Emily St

John Mandel’s unforgettable fourth novel, Station Eleven, was prescient in its depiction of a world devastated by a killer virus. Her latest, The Glass Hotel, looks to a past catastrophe instead: the financial crisis, and the end of “the age of money”.

Unfolding across multiple time zones, this ghostly novel revolves around a Ponzi scheme run by Jonathan Alkaitis, the owner of the titular, neatly metaphorical glass hotel in the wilderness on Vancouver Island. It’s there that he meets and then fake-marries a young bartender, Vincent. Vincent and Alkaitis – who, we know from the start, will respectively drown and die in prison – are the novel’s centre of gravity, though Mandel elegantly marshals other characters on the edge of this black hole, like Vincent’s recovering addict brother and Alkaitis’s victims.

There’s a fleshless quality to them all, especially Vincent. Alkaitis praises Vincent’s adaptability to a friend, who thinks: “Jonathan was describing a woman who’d dissolved into his life and become what he wanted. A disappearing act, essentially.” Mandel’s characters manifest as a collection of fears, anxieties and the odd hallucination. Alkaitis spends his prison sentence in an imagined “counterlife” in Dubai, which bleeds into reality.

And then there are the ghosts, not that anyone is fazed by them: “What does it mean to be a ghost, let alone to be there, or here? There are so many ways to haunt a person, or a life.” There’s something almost folkloric at play here: Alkaitis’s employees narrate their chapters as an “Office Chorus”.

When Vincent thinks of her marriage, “her memories of those years had an abstracted quality, as if she’d stepped temporarily outside of herself ”. It’s at times frustrating, but this haziness also makes it intriguing.

Mythic and reassuringly well written, The Glass Hotel wonders what might have been if we were “more anchored to this earth”.