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“They received their drinks from parallel bartenders at the same moment and nearly collided as they left the bar��

INTRODUCTION

Emily St John Mandel’s previous book “Station Eleven�� was on the surface a dystopian novel about a deadly pandemic with a 99% fatality rate (the Georgia Flu), occurring just after the Global Financial crash but before its longer-term effects, and examining the future lives on the handful of survivors of the pandemic. Really though it was (in the author’s own words with my brackets) �� a “love letter to the current world [of technology, art and globalization] written in the form of a requiem��.

Her latest book “The Glass Hotel�� is on the surface a fictionalized retelling of the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme that partly epitomized the Global Financial Crisis, and one which observes the fall out of that scandal on the handful of individuals most directly affected. Really though as I will explore in this review it is a ghost story in the widest sense, one which also explores the various shadow worlds which exist within our own globalized world.

Together on the surface they make an interesting pair of contrasting genre novels. Really thought they are I think best read, appreciated and understood as a single piece of work �� one which explores (as the opening quote �� my favourite across the two novels shows) parallel realities, how lives collide and intersect.

In particular, I was intrigued by the way Mandel explores what (in my review of Station Eleven) the idea of counter-factual narratives. An idea which has been explored in my own field of risk management in insurance by the Catastrophist Gordon Woo () where he considers how small changes could have turned near-misses into catastrophes (which included in the past counterfactuals on how SARS and MERS could have been much worse). Or alternately as his RMS colleague Robert Muir-Wood has applied to the case of COVID-19, how catastrophes could easily have been near-misses.

This pair of quotes shows how Mandel has used the same theme to link the two books �� each effectively describing the world of the other.

August said that given an infinite number of parallel universes there had to be one where there had been no pandemic …�� or one where they’d been a pandemic, but the virus had a subtly different genetic structure, some miniscule variance that rendered it survivable, in any case a universe in which civilization hadn’t been so brutally interrupted. Station Eleven

[Vincent] would often read a news story and find herself uneasily distracted by its opposite. Imagining an alternate reality where there was no Iraq War for example, or where the terrifying new swine flu in the Republic of Georgia hadn’t been swiftly contained; an alternative world where the Georgia Flu had blossomed into an unstoppable pandemic and civilization collapsed. The Glass Hotel

And what could be more topical than to read these two books �� one about a catastrophic global pandemic, the other about global economic collapse at a time when to ameliorate the first we have chosen the second.

OTHER LINKS BETWEEN THE BOOKS

I enjoyed spotting the other links between the two books.

- Repeating characters �� including Miranda who is key to the very title Station Eleven (and in fact is secretly drawing that graphic novel at one stage in “The Glass Hotel��) and her boss Leon Prevost. This choice was I think Important to the author, as Miranda was the key character that she sacrificed to the narrative-tension-plausibility of her pandemic story line �� and this gives her the chance to resurrect her; further Miranda and Prevost are part of perhaps the one image and theme that is strongest across both novels (as well as placing Station Eleven in time) �� the “Ghost Fleet�� of the recession. It seems odd to have to thank the Daily Mail for inspiring two such brilliant novels - �� although I will note that RMS is also owned by the Daily Mail �� as Ella says in this novel “the smallness of the world never ceases to amaze me��

- Alkaitis and his employees work in the Gradia Building in “The Glass Hotel�� �� and we follow the way in which that group (in The Office Chorus chapters) suffer the fallout of their acts. In “Station Eleven�� the most chilling image is the Air Gradia plane �� parked at the end of the runway, not allowed to disembark, the fate of its passengers and crew unspoken and all the more horrifying for it


- The idea of looking at an object and tracing its origins and the trail of its manufacture and shipping. In “Station Eleven�� Clark does this with a snow globe in his Museum of Civilization, in “The Glass Hotel�� Prevost does it with his wife’s clothing at dinner. For Clark this is a way of remembering the world that no longer existed �� for Prevost a paean to the world of shipping that he loved, a world his decision at the same dinner meant eventually no longer existed for him.


- Appropriation of diary like records from a close acquaintance which by an act of betrayal are turned into a public art form for monetary reward for the betrayer. In “The Glass Hotel�� Paul using Vincent’s 5 minute videos (and the musical inspiration of an electronic keyboards player who he had effectively manslaughtered) to launch his career; in “Station Eleven�� Victoria publishing the unanswered letters Arthur sent her and publishing them in a bestselling book.

- Objects as memorials. In “The Glass Hotel�� Claire looks at the items Simone takes from her desk for her after her husband’s arrest and a photograph which is “an artifact of a civilization that had recently ended��. This of course reminds us of Clarke and his Museum of Civilization in “Station Eleven�� �� a personal experience for Claire which mirrors a universal one that Clarke is commemorating. This in turn matching a difference between the novels �� one more an examination of universal collapse, the other more personal collapse.

SHADOWS, GHOSTS, AND DUALITY

The other part of the book that I really enjoyed was its exploration of shadow and alternative worlds (and the connections to ghosts and of course to the very doubleness of this book and “Station Eleven��). The author was from childhood I note a fan of “Secret Garden�� and “The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe��

For shadow worlds:

- The “Fairy Tale�� chapters which explore the “kingdom of money�� of the super-rich as experienced by trophy wives

- The secret world of ocean-containers (and how in turn it reveals the web of manufacturing, ports and trade routes which underpin globalisation

- The “Shadowcountry�� of casual work which underpins American society

- The penal system

- The ghost fleet of ships

For alternative and ghost worlds:

- Oskar imagines a ghost version of his life in which he called the FBI


- We are also told “He’s loved the intrigue of Seventeen �� of operating outside of the edges of society, perhaps outside of the edges of reality itself �� was there any difference, actually �� between a trade that occurred and a trade that appeared to have occurred��

- The whole Ponzi scheme in fact relied on creating trades which could plausibly have happened but only with the benefit of perfect foresight �� an alternative reality which was instead fakes with the benefit of the far more reliable hindsight

- Alkaitis in prison in the “Counterlife�� chapters is haunted by increasingly realistic ghosts

- When questioned on his fraud and how the returns were not real he says “Just because it’s a delusion doesn’t mean it can’t make real money for you. You want to take about mass delusions, I know a lot of guys who got rich off sub-prime mortgages��

- Of the hotel which gives the book its name we are told ��

Very few people who go the wilderness actually want to experience the wilderness �� they just want to look at it, ideally through the window of a luxury hotel��

To me this was similar to how the investors (many of who Alkaitis recruited in the very hotel) wanted high risk returns without any risk at all �� the ups and downs of derivative investing delivered by entirely smooth returns. Also, the illusion of transparency, like the glass with which the hotel is built

- Leon recalls both his former life, no longer available to him except via a consulting contract which compromises the one thing he had previously retained �� his sense of ethics and also thinks of “The ghost of his retirement savings, the savings themselves having been spirited away��

- Oskar thinks of Olivia “It wasn’t that she was about to lose everything, it was that she’d already lost everything and just didn’t know it yet��. This (and the quote below) reminded me of the ideas of Quantum mechanics �� of something being unknown until observed, how observation of a Quantum property collapses a distribution to a single reality �� and in turn how observation of any Ponzi scheme immediately collapses it.


- Oskar is quoted a number of times for his defence under cross-examination that “It’s possible to both know and not know something�� - to which the chorus comments “the state tore him to pieces over this but he spoke for several of us, actually, several of us who’d been thinking a great deal about that doubleness


As I hope this review shows �� I have also been thinking a great deal about the doubleness of this book and “Station Eleven��.

An outstanding and timely pair of novels.