Strange Hotel

Eimear McBride

Allen & Unwin

Otago Daily times, February 29th 2020

With her adoption of a stream-of-consciousness narrative voice and fearless examination of the complexities of sexual and familial relationships, Eimear McBride has established herself as a writer intent on pushing her readers beyond their comfort zone. Her third novel, Strange Hotel, which moves beyond the youthful perspective of her earlier works, is as challenging and rewarding as its predecessors.

The story (such as it is) follows an anonymous middle-aged woman across the course of some fifteen years as she travels the world from Oslo to Auckland, Avignon to Prague, her life reduced to a series of non-descript hotel rooms through which the city is glimpsed at one remove. Here, in these transitive, interstitial spaces where the environment can be controlled by the flick of a switch, and sex becomes a physical transaction devoid of obligation or intimacy, she exists in a state of permanent impermanence, an eternal present uncoupled from her naive, impulsive younger self. But at moments of physical or psychological weakness – the vertiginous dislocation of jet lag, one man’s violation of the understanding that a one-night stand is not an invitation for emotional engagement, the familiarity of another’s sleeping back – painful memories intrude, and she must fight to regain control.

These moments of crisis form the physical and psychological core of the book, which is divided into a series of locations, their separation in space and time delineated by a list of intervening destinations, in which the narrator’s control wavers, giving tantalising glimpses of who and what she is fleeing. Over time, these memories become more specific and less painful, a slow accretion of details that reflect her slow movement towards recovery. Thus, her pursuer changes from a ‘nobody’ who monitors her behaviour to a damaged man with whom she once shared a child, standing on a balcony no longer brings an impulse towards jumping but an awareness of how falling might be, and her hotel room becomes an embodiment of the path not taken as well as an escape from that which was.

Unlike the young protagonists of McBride’s first two novels, whose voices turn and eddy in a free-flowing stream of consciousness (and whose stories echo here ), the narrator of Strange Hotel thinks in an orderly and composed monologue in which words are a barrier to rather than an expression of emotion. This, in combination with the dislocated structure of the story that leaves so much unexplained, is both claustrophobic and frustrating, leaving many questions unanswered: What secret did her former lover disclose when she was first faced with the decision whether to stay or go, and why did she abandon him and their young son, if the latter existed at all? How can she maintain an itinerant lifestyle year after year? Do the destinations marked with an asterisk represent moments of emotional engagement, or is the author just playing with our desire to find patterns in the world around us? And just what has she got against Auckland?

Then again, how many of us in our daily ruminations think, “I can spend my life travelling because I’m a pilot/flight attendant/heiress,” or stand in a mirror describing our appearance to ourselves? And there is no getting past the beauty of McBride’s prose and her impressive mastery of form. Life is seldom tidy, and if a novel leaves you hanging, is that really such a bad thing?