Book Review: Strange Hotel by Eimear McBride

By Simon Demetriou

There is a chance that you might find Strange Hotel boring. After all, very little happens: we see the nameless protagonist in hotel room after hotel room, city after city, years passing between each place. She looks around rooms and out of windows. She flirts, and wakes up to embarrassments or awkward post-coital withdrawals. She tries not to think about her lost lover, and mostly fails. You get the picture. Except you don’t. You never really know why she is where she is.

One of the only direct hints we get is the narrator’s claim that often her reason for being in these rooms is to live ‘in a time out of time’. This muddying of spatial and temporal locations leads to one conclusion: for all the physical settings, the setting that really matters is the inside of the protagonist’s head.

This is a small book in which small things resonate with great significance. Eimear McBride’s prose itself takes a self-conscious joy in rippling with internal rhyme, playing with percussive alliteration, ending sentences on prepositions to force you into reflecting on the significance of the smallest of words in the construction of meaning. This self-conscious prose constructs a self-conscious protagonist engaged in an ongoing dialogue with herself.

She tries to evade the details that prompt memories of the lost love whose haunting she both resents and craves; at the same time she maintains her sensitivity to physical sensations that make up the escapism of the mundane, like the relaxation in the arches of the feet when you’ve had precisely the right amount of wine after a long day’s travelling, or the racing of pain up the arm when you touch an icy window on the morning after the night before.

Above all, the small things with which both the protagonist and her author are most concerned are words themselves. The prevalent narration in the third person and present tense enact the idea that the narrator uses words to create a distance that allows her to see and form her world, ‘- keeping words as far as possible from the scent of blood and guts’ and creating a revelatory tension in allowing her to figure out, or try to figure out, ‘who she is. Or who she presents to be read.’

The novel ends with a question and an itinerary that hints at its answer, so if you’re expecting clear resolution, look elsewhere. If you’re looking for a book that beautifully brings to life the mental processes of ‘a creature of oil and mess and stain’ – and isn’t this really a perfect description of any of us? – then you will find the pages of Strange Hotel well worth a visit.