82 Books & arts The EconomistMarch 28th 2020
A
fter producingthree respectable
thrillers, the Canadian author Emily
St John Mandel raised her profile with
her boldly inventive fourth novel. “Sta-
tion Eleven” (2014) tells of a flu pandemic
that devastates the Earth’s population,
and follows a group of travelling Shake-
spearean 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 che-
quered 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 anony-
mous message is scrawled on the build-
ing: “Why don’t you swallow broken
glass.” One of the guests, a shipping
executive named Leon Prevant, is dis-
turbed by the graffiti. Vincent herself isshocked 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 disori-
entating, as the narrative chops between
timelines and perspectives. Minor char-
acters, 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 “counter-
life” 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.”Woman overboard
Disappearing actsThe Glass Hotel.By Emily St John Mandel.
Knopf; 320 pages; $26.95. Picador; £14.99W
hen professorVladimir Persikov’s
wife runs off with an opera singer,
she leaves him a note. “An unbearable
shudder of revulsion is aroused in me by
your frogs,” she tells him. In “The Fatal
Eggs”, a little-known novella by Mikhail
Bulgakov, a pestilence spawned by the pro-
fessor’s zoological research threatens not
just his marriage, but civilisation itself.
The scourge in the story—published in
1925 and set three years later—is not a dis-
ease, exactly. In their imagination of epi-
demics, novels such as Mary Shelley’s “The
Last Man”, “The Plague” by Albert Camus or
José Saramago’s haunting “Blindness”
might seem more apposite in the time of
covid-19. Nor is this biting tale Bulgakov’s
finest work (that is his satirical fantasia,
“The Master and Margarita”). But as a para-
ble of bureaucratic bungling, avoidable di-
saster and drastic countermeasures, it is
horribly relevant.
In his laboratory in Moscow, Persikov
discovers a “ray of life” that makes amoe-
bae and tadpoles reproduce at speed.
Thrilled, he orders extra kit from Germany
and exotic eggs from across the Atlantic
(like the virus, this is a globalised affair).
Foreign powers covet the new technology,
but the Soviet state requisitions it to help
kick-start poultry production. The apparat-
chik in charge of the state farm, Alexander
Faight, was once a flautist in Odessa; he is
carrying his instrument when he encoun-
ters a giant serpent, which he tries to pacify
with a waltz from “Eugene Onegin”. Hefails, and the beast eats his wife.
The Russian author takes digs at the
church, heedless carousers in the streets,
blinkered scientists—and, naturally, at the
Bolsheviks. But his depiction of blasé, in-
competent officialdom resonates across
the ages and all forms of government.
“Honest to God, it’ll work out,” Faight says
blithely of the poultry plan, like a president
recommending an unproven drug. Disas-
ter ensues because the authorities botch
their deliveries, sending the hens’ eggs
meant for the farm to Persikov, and his ex-
otic specimens to the farm. Then, after the
creatures hatch, the first, all-too familiar
response is disbelief and denial. Faight
stammers a report to two security agents;
one thinks he is hallucinating, the other
that a circus animal might have escaped. A
newspaper editor dismisses an urgent tele-
gram as a drunkard’s raving.Before long, though, everyone goes ber-
serk. Martial law is declared in Moscow
amid a flood of refugees. Like quarantined
Europeans applauding ambulances from
their balconies, cowering citizens take to
the pavements to salute the cavalrymen on
their way to interspecies battle, and the
marching gas squadrons “with breathing
tubes over their shoulders and with cylin-
ders on straps behind their backs”. Artillery
units bombard forests; aeroplanes spray
poison. Civilian casualties mount. And,
following a perennial instinct, vigilantes
hunt for someone to blame.
In the end, the weather intervenes, as
some hope it might today. An unseason-
able summer frost kills the serpents and
freezes the eggs, and a year after the trouble
arose, it is all over. Moscow, Bulgakov
writes encouragingly, “again began to
dance, to burn and to spin with lights”. 7Disaster fictionThe yolk of fate
The Fatal Eggs.By Mikhail Bulgakov.
Translated by Hugh Aplin.Hesperus Press;
112 pages; £6.99