![]() ![]() She tells herself, sounding lukewarm, that she does genuinely like Alkaitis). And it’s vastly seductive, too, to enter Vincent’s new life of shopping and luxury (every day she gets the train into Grand Central station from Greenwich, Connecticut and wanders around, spending thousands on clothes – though it’s not the stuff she can buy that matters, she realises, it’s the “previously unimaginable condition of not having to think about money”. We know early on in the non-linear narrative that Alkaitis, and many of the other characters – the investors, his staff - are doomed, and the sense of foreboding is very powerful. ![]() ![]() The Glass Hotel, just as compelling as Station Eleven, is about a 2008 Bernie Madoff-style Ponzi scheme, much less apocalyptic than a pandemic, but the suddenness of Alkaitis’s fall is comparable to the onset of the Georgia flu in Station Eleven, when it was “possible to comprehend the scope of the outbreak” but not to understand what it meant. In her previous bestselling Station Eleven of 2014, about a global flu pandemic (sales rose steeply during lockdown) more lethal, swift and civilisation-zapping than Covid-19 but still remarkably pertinent in its details, St John Mandel explored similar themes. “None of these scenarios seemed less real than the life she’d landed in.” But she has an unsettling sense of other versions of her life being lived without her. ![]()
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