Hotel World (Ali Smith)

Postmodern works of fiction are always something of a gamble for a budding author. Playing with elements of form, structure and language is not for the faint hearted. For female writers especially, comparisons with the likes of Toni Morrison, Jeanette Winterson and the grand dame of them all, Virginia Woolf, can be very unforgiving. Back in 2001, 'Hotel World' by Ali Smith was nominated for both the Orange Prize and the Booker, and I remember the hype surrounding it pretty well. I think I read the first chapter in a Sunday supplement soon after graduating from university that year, and from then on it was one of those books perpetually on my theoretical lists of "to reads". Back in November last year, my girlfriend decided she wanted to buy Smith's other major novel 'The Accidental', as she'd read somewhere that it was a modern classic. I responded by saying that if I were her, I'd start with 'Hotel World'. Soon after, she returned from a trip to London, drunkenly bearing a copy of 'Hotel World' for me and a copy of 'The Accidental' for her. I plucked it from the shelf last Friday, and a week on I am extremely glad to have finally read it. This is a very moving novel indeed, exceptionally clever but never pretentious, a novel worthy of Smith's laudable influences.

The novel is set in and around one branch of the ubiquitous Global Hotels chain, tracing the experiences of five women connected in some way to this sprawling monument to Capitalism. Each section has a different female narrator and a title taken from, or aping, the name of a grammatical tense (past, present historic, future conditional, future in the past, present). Each section is seemingly stand alone, only coalescing into a complete narrative in the final lines of the book. In this way, it very much resembles William Faulkner's 'The Sound and the Fury'. As I said previously, books like Faulkner's are a tough act to follow, so it's a testament to Smith's skill as a writer that she pulls off her ambitious experimentswith such applomb.

The first section is narrated by the ghost of Sara Wilby, a teenage hotel maid who, in a horrific accident some time before, plummeted six floors to her death in a dumbwaiter she climbed into for a bet. Sara's section concerns the intangibility of life and the way in which one never feels more alive than in the moment of one's death. The second section is from the point of view of Else Freeman, a homeless woman with a chronic cough who was once interviewed by a newspaper for a crass "what's in homeless people's pockets?" feature. She begs outside the branch of Global in which Sara died and is usually driven away by hotel staff who see her as off-putting to guests. At the end of Else's section, a hotel worker gifts her a room for free, both out of pity for her and out of a sense of disgust that the hotel has so many unused rooms. This hotel worker, Lise, is the focus of the next section. Sometime after allowing Else to have the room, she has had a nervous breakdown and is attempting to fill in a medical form. While doing so, various memories of her time in the hotel surface, giving a sense of how the place runs day to day, with guests meaninglessly checking in and out, a parade of shadowed faces, a metaphor for modern life. The section also illuminates Sara and Else's stories, revealing details that help explain the previous sections. Section four is filtered through a paying guest, Penny, a hotel reviewer who becomes embroiled in a peculiar and prolonged exchange between herself, Else and a teenage girl attempting to take something out of a wall. This girl turns out to be Sara's sister Clare, whose section follows next, a first person narrative broken in syntax and coherency, the stream of consciousness representing in heartbreaking terms the depth of her grief. Finally, the novel ends with a tale from a girl from a watch shop where Sara went to get her watch repaired. The two girls were attracted to each other, but neither could act on this first flowering of love and now the watch girl does not know that Sara is dead and that is the reason she never claimed the watch back. She dreams of one day tracking down Sara and showing her the watch post repair, which she has been affectionately wearing in the interim period as "she and S.Wilby have similar sized wrists". It's a beautiful section with which to finish the book.

The themes of this book are grand ones: grief, fate, love, existence. These themes function within the microcosm of one branch of Global Hotels, but of course they also apply more widely, and that's the beauty of the book. I found the writing to be, at times, heartstoppingly beautiful, particularly in Sara's section, Clare's section and the watch girl's section. The stream of consciousness never seems forced, the modernist tics like Sara's "Wooooooohoooo" to represent her fall to death never seem overly gimmicky. I feel that Smith has certainly tackled some big questions about what it is to be alive in the twenty-first century, and has managed to ask a lot of interesting sociological questions in rather an interesting way. 'Hotel World' is certainly worthy of the hype it garnered at the time of its publication, and indeed of its place in the book displays of "prominent female authors" it often finds itself in. Recommended.