![]() ![]() Mandel writes beautifully, saying so much with such economy, and she makes a complicated plot involving so many faces and places feel effortless. The themes may be high octane, but it is the characters - and the vignettes, asides, anxieties and the very specific identities of their ghosts - which really drive the novel. It is as if the two novels were unspooling in parallel universes, one unthinkable and the other beset by the types of evilsfraud, drug. That all makes it sound a bit James Bond - it’s far, far too subtle for that. The Glass Hotel is spared that apocalypse. ![]() And grand it is, involving Ponzi schemes and shipping routes, greed and compromise and betrayals, as it catapults from New York to Vancouver to Mauritania to Dubai and plenty of places in between. ![]() In its orbit move Mandel’s characters: Vincent, beautiful and vulnerable and sad her half-brother Paul, an addict whose sadness manifests as spite Jonathan Alkaitis, the smooth New York money man who owns the place Leon, a mild-mannered shipping executive passing through and who is therefore caught in the crossfire of the novel’s grand plot. The Glass Hotel is a very different sort of book, but with the same beautiful character work and lovely writing. The pleasure, which in the case of The Glass Hotel is abundant, lies in the patterns themselves, not in anything they mean. New West End Company BRANDPOST | PAID CONTENTĪt its centre is the Hotel Caiette, the titular glass hotel: a five-star spaceship positioned on a remote tip of Vancouver island, that is surrounded by impassive water and pine trees standing sentry in the shadows. ![]()
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