People—and money—vanish in “The Glass Hotel”

The Glass Hotel. By Emily St John Mandel.Knopf; 320 pages; $26.95. Picador; £14.99.

AFTER PRODUCING three respectable thrillers, the Canadian author Emily St John Mandel raised her profile with her boldly inventive fourth novel. “Station Eleven” (2014) tells of a flu pandemic that devastates the Earth’s population, and follows a group of travelling Shakespearean actors who perform for the survivors 20 years later. The narrative’s before-and-after structure beautifully balances the life and death of a single individual against the fate of civilisation. Beyond its grim dystopia, the story hints at a brave new world founded on hope and humanity.

Today, “Station Eleven” is as timely as a novel can be. Ms Mandel’s new book, “The Glass Hotel”, partly revolves around another catastrophe, only this one is financial and hope is more elusive. Swapping the post-apocalyptic future for the recent past, and charting the chequered fates of a wide cast of characters, she spins a beguiling tale about skewed morals, reckless lives and necessary means of escape.

The main protagonist is Vincent, a young (female) bartender at a swish hotel on Vancouver Island who had a tragic childhood. One night a vicious anonymous message is scrawled on the building: “Why don’t you swallow broken glass.” One of the guests, a shipping executive named Leon Prevant, is disturbed by the graffiti. Vincent herself is shocked and contemplates fleeing, even disappearing. Instead, after serving drinks to the hotel’s owner, Jonathan Alkaitis, she seizes an opportunity and elopes with him to New York.

There she adjusts to her new role as a trophy wife in “the kingdom of money”. Alas, all that glitters turns out to have been fraudulently acquired. Alkaitis is running a multibillion-dollar Ponzi scheme reminiscent of Bernie Madoff’s; its collapse wipes out fortunes and forces Vincent to start afresh, this time as a cook on a container ship. But while at sea she disappears overboard. Leon, one of many investors ruined by Alkaitis, is charged with solving the mystery. Did Vincent fall or was she pushed? And has she washed up on another shore ready to reinvent herself again?

“The Glass Hotel” is a sprawling, immersive book. In places it is disorientating, as the narrative chops between timelines and perspectives. Minor characters, such as Vincent’s half-brother, drift in and out. And yet the novel’s scope and brimming vitality are also its strengths. Vincent’s encounters with the plutocracy are memorably realised; so are Alkaitis’s concoction of a “counterlife” in his prison cell and his employees’ struggles to save their skins.

In the end, all the stories are drawn together by a single question: can you ever escape what you have done in the past, and what has been done to you? “There are so many ways to haunt a person,” the author writes, “or a life.”