The Economist USA - 28.03.2020

74 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 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 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 acts

The Glass Hotel.By Emily St John Mandel.

Knopf; 320 pages; $26.95. Picador; £14.99

W

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”. He

fails, 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”. 7

Disaster fiction

The yolk of fate

The Fatal Eggs.By Mikhail Bulgakov.

Translated by Hugh Aplin.Hesperus Press;

112 pages; £6.99