Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent's half-brother, Paul, 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. ...
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Vincent is a bartender at the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass and cedar palace on an island in British Columbia. Jonathan Alkaitis works in finance and owns the hotel. When he passes Vincent his card with a tip, it's the beginning of their life together. That same day, Vincent's half-brother, Paul, 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, the story moves between the ship, the skyscrapers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of northern Vancouver Island, painting a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy and delusion, art and the ghosts of the pasts.
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I was excited to get the ARC of The Glass Hotel after really enjoying Emily St John. Mandel's previous book 'Station Eleven'. The Glass Hotel is an odd story and not one that sadly I think works. The plot centres around a man that gets sentenced to a life in prison for a Ponzi scheme and the impact of that on his family and colleagues. It takes about 60% of the book to get to that point though and I was honestly confused about the plot up until that point which isn't a great start to a novel!
I think the main problem is the way Mandel chooses to tell the story. We start by getting to know Paul - a drug addict who has made a lot of mistakes in his life. We are with him for quite a few chapters, getting to know him and his history and then we never really see him again until the end - it felt a bit of a waste. We then move on to a man owning a random hotel, then Paul's sister, her husband Jonathan, a random man in shipping, an old painter, some colleagues, a man who works at sea... It just felt too much without really going anywhere. I understand that they are all linked to the scheme and to each other which is quite a clever device - side characters in one story then become more integral in others but to be honest I didn't really feel anything for any of them. The constant leaps of perspective happened too often for us to actually understand why we had been given an insight into that perspective in the first place. We only get to know each character after they've invested and it's all gone wrong - which doesn't really give us an insight into their personality or make us empathise with them before the scheme ruined their life. If we had perhaps gotten to know Jonathan before he started the scheme for example, or the reasons why some of them chose to invest to start with, we would have perhaps felt empathy with at least some of the characters. I think the fact this is actually inspired by true events makes me even sadder as the book could have been a really interesting look at the real events and psychology of the people involved and yet just ended up as a mess.
As well as having confusion of the main plot there was also a kind of side plot about ghosts which didn't really make much sense. I guess it was to portray certain character's guilt but at times characters saw ghosts of people that they didn't even know had died. For a plot that's supposed to be based on a real-life scheme the break into a paranormal seemed a bizarre choice. I also really didn't understand the hotel storyline and the importance of the graffiti on the window either.
Overall, I was really disappointed with The Glass Hotel - it's a mess of a plot and too many characters that the reader cares nothing for. Thank you to NetGalley & Pan Macmillan - Picador for the chance to read the ARC in exchange for an honest review.
