Strange Hotel

Originally, she’d thought this was just for a while but it had become, in the aftermath of turbulent times, her preferred manner in which to proceed. Thinking her way carefully around every instant. Grammatically and logically constructing it. Even now, she can hear herself doing it. Lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse which first set them all in train. She’s doing it now, and now, and now, and now, and it will continue, she’s certain, unto the horizon and then, indeed, beyond. Frankly, she finds it exhausting, interrogating her own interrogation.

I ended my review of Eimear McBride's previous novel, The Lesser Bohemians, by commenting that “given the extremely troubled past relationships of Eilis, Stephen and his wife, the reader can not help but assume that it will be unlikely that they will in reality all live happily ever after.”

Her third novel Strange Hotel provides an answer of sorts, and suggests that the relationship may have ended not in separation (as I had assumed) but tragedy. The narrator of this novel may or may not be Eilis, but there is a scene in her past that is very similar to that in the previous book, and we gradually discern that her partner died just before he turned 50 and shortly after they had a son. McBride acknowledges the ambiguity:

"I do think that my books are very intertwined. And Strange Hotel could be the story of Eilis twenty years later. But there are reasons she’s not named. That’s not set in stone."

Strange Hotel, while only around 150 pages, is set over 18 years, spanning the middle age of the narrator, a London-based Irish woman, who is aged 35 when the novel opens and (I think) 53 when it ends (she refers to an event 35 years earlier which would have taken place when she was 18).

The narrator - for reasons to which we are not privy - travels, alone, around the world over the years to a variety of hotels, no longer the girl who’s never been anywhere, (a neat nod to Eilis in Lesser Bohemians).

McBride has suggested these are places where she herself as stayed on various book tours.

These places are recorded in the novel via by a list of city names, some marked with a cross, which seems to designate where the narrator undertook a casual fling.

In five instances over the unmarked years (in Avignon, Prague, Oslo, Auckland, Austin) the lists are interrupted with a short passage describing her stay in the hotel. But the narration doesn't leave her room, and is largely focused on her own interior journey and understanding.

The first hotel is in Avignon, with a nod to one of the novel's key influences (see also below):

"Fronds dust-patinaed to rust, as though some off-Riviera Death in Venice were the desired effect. Should this be the case they’ve not been entirely unsuccessful, she reflects – the aqueous decadence of old Venice excepted, alongside any perceptible increase in the likelihood of an untimely death."

But some limited description of the rooms aside, if anything, the narrator seeks out hotels for their anonmyity and heterogeneity:

"Some must have bigger bathrooms. Super king beds. Perhaps facilities more elaborate than a teabag and kettle, or a dispiritingly understocked mini-bar – she’s not reflecting on her own room’s amenities now, she has yet to check. But opportunities for increased billing and superfluities aside, she will not, cannot deny that, once distilled all hotel rooms are essentially alike, if not exactly the same. A place built for people living in a time out of time – out of their own time anyway. And if that isn’t always the reason why they came, it is often the reason she has."

But as McBride has explained, in a sense her plan backfires, as it forces her to confront her own situation:

"Spending time in a place in which you have no personal stake breeds a peculiar kind of contemplativeness and makes it harder to evade any sense of existential isolation you may be prone to experiencing."

The tightly controlled, elliptical language here is very different to her first two novels as even the narrator acknowledges: this does, occasionally, make her wistful for the savagery of before when, beholden to no one, the words did whatever they pleased.. McBride herself has explained:

My first two novels feature young protagonists who are at the mercy of their impulses, and of experience more generally, but this time around, I was writing a woman old enough to be able to assert control over how she reacts to the outside world. In fact, her aim is to keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, which is the reason behind the far more formal – perhaps even overly formal – register of Strange Hotel.

I am a massive fan of McBride, both her literary influences:

"The 20th century European legacy was far more on my mind during the writing, particularly Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. Von Aschenbach’s rootlessness and paralysis in the face of his own ruined mortality has always exerted a powerful sway over my imagination and this seemed the moment to give that influence an opportunity to play itself out. Work in translation has always been central to my reading and having the influence of Dostoyevsky’s The Devils on The Lesser Bohemians, and Mann[‘s Death in Venice] on Strange Hotel, completely ignored in favour of the old Irish reliables gets quite irritating."

(elsewhere when compared to Sally Rooney, McBride says she feels more “literary kinship” with writers like Anna Burns, Claire-Louise Bennett and Anakana Schofield)

and for her views on how novels should be written:

"McBride has an aversion to exposition. “It just doesn’t interest me to write it,” she says. “I just don’t care. The things that count to me are the things going on inside. Things that hit.” These are strewn across her novels: moments of humiliation, desire or violence, the thrill and terror of intimacy, smells, sounds, déjà vu. “There are things that invade you, that you can’t control, no matter how protective you are. There are things that will just go through all of that. Those are the things I’m interested in catching.”

But she is also frustrated by a “backlash” reasserting the literary merit of conventional fiction, the kind that you can “enjoy reading or skimming. I have a problem with those books being treated as serious literature. That annoys me, a lot.”"

That said, Strange Hotel is a difficult book with which to engage, but then McBride would argue that making the reader work is the point of worthwhile literature. Here, the narrator manages to not only keep the world, and memory itself, at a distance, but, perhaps inevitably, the reader as well. I had to read the novel a second time to really connect with it.

But McBride succeeds brilliantly in the effect she wants to create - a character who wants to keep both others (including her various lovers, who she casually discards when they have fulfilled their service) and her own feelings at a distance:

"Forever the carnival trick of a seeing woman trying not to see? Forever the carnival trick of a woman trying not to be … opened into every room on every floor in every hotel around the world? Unfolded and unfolded, boundlessly. Never to be less or more, better or worse. Just this crystallised extending version of self. Liberated from the scourge of accountability as well as hope of reprieve. But no … not exempt reality. Still moving forward. Still on the inside of time."

and a narrator circling around a double underlying trauma: her partner's death but also his personal revelations early on in their relationship, echoing her previous novel.

"All these years later, I’m still thinking about that night. In some ways I think I’ve never stopped circling it, niggling at what it meant. About him. About me. It is my brightest, my one unalterable memory. No matter what use I put it to, it never fails to bloom. So, if in every life there must be a touchstone, then this one is irrefutably mine. Because. That night I heard a story that might have made me run. I learned how the body I had loved and touched had lived another life. Pitilessly, physically. In its recountment, guiltily. Even, when younger, brokenly, in ways similar to mine."

And as with Lesser Bohemians the novel ends on a note of hope - one rather cleverly signalled by the closing list.

In a way I hesitate to recommend this book, but I certainly found it highly worthwhile.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/jan/24/eimear-mcbride-women-are-really-angry

https://inews.co.uk/culture/books/strange-hotel-eimear-mcbride-interview-men-in-power-1384095

https://granta.com/interview-eimear-mcbride/

https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2020/02/eimear-mcbride-interview-strange-hotel-grief-politics-fiction

https://thequietus.com/articles/27936-eimear-mcbride-interview-strange-hotel