Kingdom of Money - The Glass Hotel (2020) Part 1
The novel prickles in your grasp. The sweat on your fingertips make turning the pages easier, but the sense of an axe about to fall remains. You glance up from the words: the gardener is attending the rhododendrons by the edge of the terrace, and once again you feel a flutter of anticipation.
David, Pat and @DarthdYT dip their toes into the heady, brilliant waters of Emily St John Mandel's brilliant novel.
Glossary: https://zeroindent.com/apocalypse/
D.C. McNeill: The structuring idea of this book is basically there's a hotel and the hotel is this big elaborate fancy glass hotel obviously in Caiette, which is a remote insula, like it's not even a spit, it's a tiny strip of little houses in the Canadian wilderness. We get our first glimpse of this through uh Vincent's perspective as a kid. Something I should say, we were talking about this in Station 11, and you guys looked at me like I was crazy. So, in the books, Caiette is where Miranda and Arthur are also from.
Patrick: Oh, okay... wait... Miranda and Arthur are from the same place...
D.C. McNeill: They're both from Caiette. So that's the big connective tissue with, at least nominally, that's the big connective piece of tissue with Station 11.
Patrick: Is Caeitte meant to be in and around like Ontario?
D.C. McNeill: It's not. It's based on qu--fuck, um, I don't how you say that... Quatsino? Quastono? North of Vancouver Island.
Patrick: Watching David try to pronounce words he doesn't know how to pronounce is one of my favourite things.
D.C. McNeill: I don't know, dude. But similar vibe like Great Lakes vibes.
Patrick: Yeah okay.
D.C. McNeill: So nominally the idea is that like the whole of this corpus sort of centers around this one geographical location in some way or another.
Patrick: Yeah. Exactly. Severn City.
D.C. McNeill: This is the lake that presumably Jeevan crosses and so forth. Let me give you our first glimpse of Caiette because I think the description is probably relevant. So, this is Vincent and Paul catching the bus home from school just after Vincent has vandalized the school property with the words, "Sweet me up." Which she just thinks is really poetic. And it's really funny because Paul catches her doing it. And he's like, "Why did you do that?" She's like, "I don't know. I just like the phrase" - it's very um it's very kid brain stuff.
This is our first proper look at it. This is on page 30 of the e-pub:
They rode the bus in silence back to Grace Harbor where the mailboat waited to take them to Caiette. The boat careered around the peninsula and Paul stared at the massive construction site where the new hotel was going up, at the clouds at the back of Melissa's head, at the trees on the shore. Anything to avoid looking into the depths of the water. Nothing he wanted to think about down there. When he glanced at Vincent, he was relieved to see that she wasn't looking at the water the water either. She was looking at the darkening sky.
On the far side of the peninsula was Caiette, this place that made Port Hardy look like a metropolis in comparison. Twenty-one houses pinned between the water and the forest. The total local infrastructure consisting of a road with two dead ends, a small church from the 1850s, a one room post office, a shuttered one room elementary school. There hadn't been enough children to keep the school open since the 80s, and a single pier.
