‘Begin at the end: plummeting down the side of the ship in the storm’s wild darkness, breath gone with the shock of falling, my camera flying away through the rain.’
Vincent and Paul, two half-siblings, grew up separately in British Columbia. There are gaps in Paul’s life, time he has lost to heroin addiction. And, while Paul aspires to be a composer, he earns a living in low-skilled work. Vincent, his younger half-sister, is haunted by the death of her mother. Vincent, who dropped out of high school, makes video art in her spare time.
The two are brought together, working at Hotel Caiette an exclusive 5-star hotel on the northernmost tip of Vancouver Island. Vincent is working as a bartender and arranges a job for Paul who, wracked with guilt, fled Toronto after he gave a tainted ecstasy pill to a musician who died consequently.
‘But does a person have to be either admirable or awful? Does life have to be so binary? Two things can be true at the same time, he told himself.’
On the night that businessman Jonathan Alkaitis, the owner of Hotel Caiette is scheduled to arrive, a message is scrawled on the lobby’s glass wall:
‘Why don’t you swallow broken glass?’
Alkaitis never sees the message, which was intended for him. He meets Vincent in the bar and leaves her with his business cars as well as a hundred-dollar tip. Twelve months later, they are living together as husband and wife. Jonathan provides the financial security Vincent seeks. Alkaitis appears wealthy, an illusion created through a Ponzi scheme which inevitably collapses, destroying many lives. Alkaitis is arrested, Vincent walks away.
‘It’s possible to both know and not know something.’
Vincent works as a cook on a container ship, while Paul eventually finds some success as a musician. They have drifted apart, and then Vincent disappears.
‘It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.’
This is the first novel I have read by Emily St John Mandel although I have others on my reading list. It is a powerful novel, encompassing disaster on different scales: from the personal, including Paul’s addiction through the interpersonal, including the distance Paul and Vincent usually maintain from each other, to the catastrophic consequences of greed. Paul and Vincent are both haunted by self-doubt, neither can find a comfortable space in which to live. But my overwhelming sympathy is with those whose lives were ruined by Alkaitis’s schemes.
A beautifully written, disturbing novel.
Jennifer Cameron-Smith
Tasmanian Bibliophile @Large 