Courtesy: Holly Williams | News Source: theguardian.com
If you’ve read so much as a sentence of Eimear McBride’s writing, it is likely to have burned into your brain. Her first two novels, A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing and The Lesser Bohemians, were both written with a ferocious immediacy, in hurtling, viscerally direct prose that captures pre-verbal thought processes “far back in the mind”, as McBride put it.
Strange Hotel feels like a book determined to show just how different it is from its predecessors. An unnamed 35-year-old woman checks into a hotel in Avignon; over the years, we’ll meet her in several more – in Prague, Oslo, Auckland and Austin. She monitors her desire to drink, to have casual sex, and to not quite look at her own past. She is haunted by a lost love, and these encounters with others – or mostly, really, with herself – in these anonymous rooms bring painful flashes of that former relationship.
One clear departure is in the voice, which is expressed in a kind of convoluted verbosity (“it’s merely her preference not to indulge mortality’s by now routine assaults on her carefully habituated ennui”), as her protagonist engages in an endless, spiralling conversation with herself – analysing her thought patterns, second-guessing her motivations, casting judgment on her evasions and justifications.
The woman uses this discursive language to control her actions and cage her emotions, to (occasionally literally) talk herself down from the edge: “lining words up against words, then clause against clause until an agreeable distance has been reached from the initial, unmanageable impulse”. In the final section – which notably moves from third to first person – she acknowledges that this “relentlessly reshuffling the deck of pseudo-intellectual garble … serves the solitary purpose of keeping the world at the far end of a very long sentence”.
All this is so removed from the fragmented, hot-headed language of McBride’s earlier novels, it feels pointed. The character herself addresses this: she recalls being raised to keep words “as far as possible from the scent of blood and guts” but that she couldn’t help herself, and “all the words filled up with blood and moved around as though entitled to motion … The trick was knowing when to stop. The trick was knowing how much others could take. And then she got tired of the trick. And then she saw others using sub-standard versions of it.”
It’s tempting to interpret this as McBride on some level anticipating the reader’s response to her distinctive change in style. But it’s also possible to ascribe it to one of her previous fictional characters. When the woman describes the first time she stayed in a hotel, taken there by her older lover, the age gap between the two will remind previous readers of the characters of Eily and Stephen in The Lesser Bohemians, as will other details. Could this be Eily’s evolution of literary style rather than (or as well as) McBride’s?
It’s hard to say – this short book is evasively lacking in context. We never know why the woman is in these cities, or what she does in them. We never see her leave the hotel rooms.
Hotel rooms are strange – and McBride captures brilliantly the uncanny feeling of replication across cities and continents they give, how they seem to exist out of time, and how an abstract, untethered version of the self stacks up whenever you check in. But Strange Hotel’s view is also limited, always turning inwards rather than outwards. There’s a stuffy, airless claustrophobia to the character’s solipsism.
“If the past comes in, it will wring her neck”, the woman fears, which feels like a promise for us as much as it is a threat for her – but it’s one McBride doesn’t wholly fulfil. There are a couple of beautifully controlled drops into devastating emotion, but for much of the book, the character desperately tries to avoid that darkness. Without much action in the present or much revelation about the past, going inward isn’t that revelatory.
McBride has pinned down the inner workings of an individual arguing with themselves with as much coherent virtuosity as she captured the unrestrained rush of youthful impressions and geysering emotions in Girl and The Lesser Bohemians. It’s just that – to put it bluntly – the result is rather less interesting.
• Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride is published by Faber (£12.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 020-3176 3837. Free UK p&p over £15
As 2020 begins…
… we’re asking readers, like you, to make a new year contribution in support of the Guardian’s open, independent journalism. This has been a turbulent decade across the world – protest, populism, mass migration and the escalating climate crisis. The Guardian has been in every corner of the globe, reporting with tenacity, rigour and authority on the most critical events of our lifetimes. At a time when factual information is both scarcer and more essential than ever, we believe that each of us deserves access to accurate reporting with integrity at its heart.
You’ve read 16 articles in the last four months. More people than ever before are reading and supporting our journalism, in more than 180 countries around the world. And this is only possible because we made a different choice: to keep our reporting open for all, regardless of where they live or what they can afford to pay.
We have upheld our editorial independence in the face of the disintegration of traditional media – with social platforms giving rise to misinformation, the seemingly unstoppable rise of big tech and independent voices being squashed by commercial ownership. The Guardian’s independence means we can set our own agenda and voice our own opinions. Our journalism is free from commercial and political bias – never influenced by billionaire owners or shareholders. This makes us different. It means we can challenge the powerful without fear and give a voice to those less heard.
None of this would have been attainable without our readers’ generosity – your financial support has meant we can keep investigating, disentangling and interrogating. It has protected our independence, which has never been so critical. We are so grateful.
As we enter a new decade, we need your support so we can keep delivering quality journalism that’s open and independent. And that is here for the long term. Every reader contribution, however big or small, is so valuable. Support The Guardian from as little as $1 – and it only takes a minute. Thank you.
