“Door. Scratched dull lock. Put in. Turn the key. Fail. Joggle. Lean into. Be firm. Try again now. Try again, again. And, on another try, there. She’s in.” The nameless protagonist of Eimear McBride’s Strange Hotel – whose story is revealed, apart from a brief passage near the end of the book, in the close third person – is here caught going into a hotel room in Avignon, southern France, the first of five such transient stopping places. And, with the “fail” and “try” chiming through that string of brief sentences, McBride reveals this narrative’s link with Beckett, whose short piece “Worstward Ho” contains the famous words, usually decontextualised to sound like an exhortation to persistence: “Fail again. Fail better.”
“Worstward Ho”, like most of Beckett’s work, locates existential drama firmly within the confines of the physical body, the flesh cage that the mind must drag with it wherever it goes, but which can also offer moments of forgetting and release. In her previous two novels, A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, McBride has probed this porous boundary, and its connection to how we break language down in order to represent the chaotic interplay between our thoughts and our bodily sensations, appetites and stresses. In Strange Hotel, too, there is a constant traffic between the impulses and exigencies of the body and the looping digressions and brutal hairpin bends of the mind. “That is the plan. That is plan,” she intones to herself in France, determined not to allow herself to wake with an unknown man in her hotel room, but “the plan” seems to refer to something much more fundamental and not immediately apparent than mere carnal reluctance.
Slowly, as we travel from Avignon to Prague to Oslo to Auckland to Austin, our guide progressing from 35 to later middle age, a few details emerge. None of them relates to locations or to the reason for travel; instead, they cast back to the traumatic past, and to a relationship that, for a reason concealed for a large part of the book, no longer exists. The sexual encounters that take place in the narrative’s present are kept within firm bounds, with nothing other than a brief meeting of bodies required; when one man suggests breakfast, he is sent on his way. “She liked his laugh and the weird way their bodies kept insisting on contact. This, however, does not alter the fact that the only place for impulse is in her past. She knows this. She has made it like that so everything occurring, after the old life stopped, would simply be an again. A kind of repeat. Nothing new.”
These bare bones make Strange Hotel sound as though it is a meditation on romantic loss and a sketch of the accommodations one makes in its absence. In a way it is; but it also delves far more deeply into the instability of identity. It evokes a precariousness that flits between the physical, the mental and the linguistic – specifically, the narrator’s identity as a woman. In Auckland, she is spooked by a mirrored lift – “a box of reflections closing in” – in which a young woman with “consternated face” and a look of “do or die” applies blusher to her cheeks. But her instinctive dismay verging on disapproval is, she realises, a way of ignoring the fact that she too is looking at herself: “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 … Still moving forward. Still on the inside of time.”
If impulse must be left in the past, then the present – the moment-to-moment present, in which floors must be crossed, light switches turned on and off, beds turned down – becomes almost impossible to live in. Extended passages see the woman wrestling with her inability to carry out the most basic of physical tasks, postponing the moment of decision and action, attempting to think her way through it even as she scorns her over-thinking. In a space like a hotel room, which is devoid of familiar cues, and rinsed of its previous inhabitants and lives, thoughts have no reason not to circle.
Strange Hotel oscillates between a kind of obsessional neurosis – a fixation on repetition and control – and neurasthenia, a deadening, fatigued inability to act. Those twinned emotional states transmit themselves to the reader, who worries away at what meaning is being suggested, while also wondering if the attempt is designed and destined not to bear fruit. When the novel shifts to the first person, the “I” reveals herself to be both a much younger version of the woman at a significant emotional crossroads in her youth, and a writer looking back, unsure of her attachment to what she is doing. “I do like all these lines of words,” she tells us, “but they don’t seem to be helping much with keeping the distance any more.” And there, perhaps, is the crux; whether writer or reader, keeping the distance is not as straightforward a matter as it seems. Reading Strange Hotel is indeed a matter of strange immersion, and one that will often puzzle and sometimes frustrate the reader, but its portrait of sadness and alienation is, in the end, also strangely revivifying.
• Strange Hotel is published by Faber (RRP £12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Free UK p&p on all online orders over £15.
