Kingdom of Money

 

When New York financier Jonathan Alkaitis, owner the Hotel Caiette, a five-star glass-and-cedar palace on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island, passes his card to the beautiful bartender Vincent with a tip, it marks the beginning of their life together.  On  the same day, a hooded figure scrawls a note on the widowed 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.

Emily St John Mandel’s The Glass Hotel moves between the ship, the towers of Manhattan, and the wilderness of remote British Columbia, displaying a breathtaking picture of greed and guilt, fantasy, and delusion.

The theme of Glass Hotel is an apt question to consider during the pandemic and suited to the imagination of Emily St John Mandel.

It is 2008,  and we are witnessing a different kind of precariousness the financial crisis leads to the exposure of financier Jonathan Alkaitis as a fraudster who has been running a Ponzi scheme for over a decade says Mandel on the Bernard Madoff case. He and his wife Vincent the protagonist inhabit “the kingdom of money” – a palace that she, a once future waitress and ship’s cook, knows she is just visiting.

Vincent and some of the other characters who are ruined when the scheme collapses then return to the “shadow country”, where people flit between mobile homes, from menial job to menial job.

The fates of the restless Vincent and her shiftless brother Paul, the paring at the heart of the novel, provides a disturbing and unifying bookend  – and reinvents himself to cope with the impermanence that is the theme of the novel, but only through theft, the other adapt s to survive.

No one comes through unscathed and the comeuppances are unfairly and unevenly handed out. Everyone seems to be trying to escape, on the run, but without finding refuge or solace.

 

The Glass Hotel by Emily St John Mandel, Picador £14.99, 320 pages.