EXIT PARTY by Emily St. John Mandel – Reviewed by Stella

A world bificuated. A world in chaos. A world in order. A story of dopplegangers. A story of resistance. A story of mystery and uncertainty. The story of a painting.
In Emily St. John Mandel’s Exit Party we meet each protagonist in the near future; a future beyond a catastrophe — an incident never fully explained. One that has split the world in two. Ari has arrived back in the world after almost two decades in prison. Curfew has just been lifted and Kareem is having a party to celebrate. Ari tags along with her flatmate Gloria. Their world is chaotic and unpredicatble — America now a series of nation states, many still tussling at their borders and others still raging within — but in new California people are hopeful that the years of war have passed. They are looking up and out at the prospect of a positive future no matter how furtive that future may be. But something is wrong with the party, and the lives of Ari, Gloria and Kareem will be altered in ways they could not imagine and hardly explain. A Side.

B Side opens at the half way point of the novel, and we meet a fresh set of characters some 33 years on from the party (which does not happen in this world) , if it is possible in this non-linear structure to keep time in order. St. John Mandel cleverly weaves time, as she does worlds, moving back and forth along strings of perspective and story, each portion telling us something new as we piece togther the parts. We are propelled forward by what each character knows (or doesn’t). What does exist in this ordered highly surveiled world is technology and a scientific experiment. For a variety of reasons, but often diffferent (especially between the lead scientists) physicists Nico and her husband, Kareem, have devised a system of teleportation. They have moved objects and mice across the laboratory and now it is their turn. We know Nico was uncertain. She had told her best friend Ibari Waker (who just happens to be Service – a dedicated employee of the state’s surveilance department ) to promise to look out for her children. Ibari imagines this is a immenient divorce situation, but the break-up is more permanent than either could have imagined.

The painting, ‘Swan Dive’, appears in both worlds. It comes from a time before the world splits, and has a magnetism for several in both worlds. Kareem (A Side) inherited it, Gloria covets it, Nico was gifted it (B Side), Ari bought it, and Sebastian (Gloria’s son) stole it. St. John Mandel infiltrated it. Like David Mitchell of Cloud Atlas fame, St. John Mandel works charcaters, happenings, and in this case a painting, into Exit Party. Ibari/Ari features in an earlier novel, and ‘Swan Dive’ can be found hanging on the wall in The Glass Hotel. For anyone who has read the authors other novels, there’s fun in the matching, but knowing is not necessary, and doesn’t explain the situation. That a painting sits quietly at the epicentre is an intriguing proposition.

In A Side, Ari moves on from America to Paris, on the run with Felix – her business partner and later her first husband – after some shady gun dealing does wrong. Yet Felix has a mark on his back, and misadvenuture follows this man (once he was a ballet dancer — and still is in B Side). Ari, forever the opportunist, lands on her feet with her second husband Bill, an ex-mercernary, but chaos isn’t something you can control. Ari’s instinct saves her, while Bill’s rationalist approach does not. In B Side, Ibari is moving up the ranks of Service, but her curiosity about Nico’s disappearance and her involvement with Nico’s children runs at crossroads to the rationale for Service. She realises that the world is slippery, and, as she fits the puzzle pieces together, she has more questions then answers.
What is St. John Mandel delving into? Throughout we are struck with questions. What is better, chaos or order? What shapes us, nature or nurture? Should we toe the line or rebel? What does resistence look like? All have consequences for their actions, but when situations are enforced on someone how responsible are they for their behaviour? In her previous novels, The Glass Hotel and Sea of Tranquility, we have crossed the tracks of time, speculative worlds and metaphysics, and in her most well known Station Eleven we have an end of world dystopia. These are not new themes, but in Exit Party, the convolutions are addictive, her ability to weave story-within-story narratives clever and like her other work, the characaters are compelling and their stories hook you, doubled.