Last Night in Montreal – Emily St. John Mandel
Expectation: A noir crime mystery with Mandel’s signature observations about life and culture.
Reality: Dreadfully slow and utterly pretentious, thankfully the author’s storytelling has improved since her debut.
My Take:
It’s interesting dipping into the back catalog of an author you admire, because chances are you’ll either love or hate what you find — there’s little in between.
Over three consecutive novels — “Station Eleven,” “The Glass Hotel” and “Sea of Tranquility” — Emily St. John Mandel solidified herself on my “always read” list of authors, so I cautiously took a chance on her debut, “Last Night in Montreal.”
Lilia has spent her life transient, and once she starts to feel comfortable with Eli in New York City, she flees. He, naturally, wants closure and follows a lead on her whereabouts to Montreal where he meets Michaela, who has her own connection to Lilia.
I’m the first to admit that a noir mystery does little to get me excited, but the premise was interesting enough. In hindsight, I should’ve kept this shelved. It’s well written, sure, but it also lacks two crucial elements: likable characters and a propulsive plot.
Mandel is highly literary — which I love — but in her later works she found the balance between ruminations on fate, success and human connection while still chugging the story along.
Oftentimes this felt like a mishmash of ideas — you see several teases that would become crucial elements of Mandel’s later works — that were presented to show the depth of the author’s interests and intelligence but that served little narrative function.
Frequently the characters in “Montreal” spend their time debating philosophy, critiquing art, lambasting the Québécois or simply complaining about being highly educated and underemployed. All of these frequent digressions overshadowed the one part of the story that worked: Lilia’s flashbacks and police detective Christopher’s dogged pursuit of her.
I never bought the relationships between the characters, and even the big reveal didn’t make this journey feel any less tedious. It was almost too literary for its own good. My lack of enthusiasm for “Montreal” did little to squash my appreciation for Mandel, however, especially since her storytelling has gotten progressively stronger.
While I was ready to write off the rest of Mandel’s pre-“Station Eleven'' novels, she revealed at an event I attended that her next novel will feature a character from “The Singer’s Gun,” her second novel. Now that she’s expanding the reach of her Mandelverse beyond the dystopian and supernatural, fans are essentially required to read her first three novels (don't forget “The Lola Quartet”), which shouldn’t feel like a chore but it does.
Finally, the audiobook narrated by Alyssa Bresnahan was so unremarkable that I can barely recall anything about it two weeks after finishing the novel; it was as bland as mayonnaise. With that said, go into any format with tempered expectations.
Rating (story): 2.5/5 stars
Rating (narration): 2.5/5 stars
Format: Audiobook (library loan)
Dates read: May 2 – May 7, 2023
Multi-tasking: Okay. There are numerous timelines and characters to keep tabs on, so it’s easy to get confused if you aren’t paying close enough attention.
