By Ali Smith, this was published in 2001. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year (sharing the shortlist with Atonement, and also not winning).

Hotel World is set in an unnamed town in northern England in the year 1999, so the new millennium is just around the corner. And its action -- such as it is -- revolves around a hotel that's part of the Global Hotels chain ("Global Hotels. All Over The World... Global Hotels. We Think The World Of You").



There are six sections, and five key characters.

The first chapter comes from the ghost of 19-year-old Sara Wilby. We find out later that she's a promising swimmer and a much-missed sister, but the first thing we know about her is that she's a dead chambermaid. Up on the top floor, she makes a bet with a co-worker that she's small and supple enough to fit into the dumbwaiter. She is. But the cables break, and she's plunged down past many floors to her death.

The opening definitely makes you sit up and take notice. Woooooooo-hooooooo, it begins, stretched over two lines. That's the kind of noise a ghost would make, I guess. A pretend ghost, wearing a sheet for Hallowe'en. But ours is a real ghost, and the noise evokes the fatal fall:

"Woooooooo-
hooooooo what a fall what a soar what a plummet what a dash into dark into light what a plunge what a glide thud crash what a drop what a rush what a swoop what a fright what a mad hushed skirl what a smash mush mash-up broke and gashed what a heart in my mouth what an end.

"What a life.

"What a time.

"What I felt. Then. Gone."


The Majapahit Hotel, Surabaya, 2013. Much, much smarter than the Global...

That's a poignant chapter, that first one. We're invited to think about what you miss about life when you don't have it any more.

The ghost of Sara is curious, keen to understand things before she drifts off to some other stage of death. She attends her own funeral; she hovers around the places she knew; she appears to her family, although it's only her sister who's receptive; and she reinvades her body, which is decaying but seems to have more clarity on the accident than the hovering spirit does.

And we hear about what might have been. There's a girl at the watchshop that she really liked. She had hung around, hoping for a conversation, but it didn't happen, and now it can't.

Hers is a hovering spirit that is slowly losing touch with the material world. She's starting to lose the words for things; starting to confuse "I" and "she"; starting to feel fuzzier:

"Above me the birds singing, further and further away. Each day a little further, more muffled, like wool in the ears...

"Remember you must leave...

"It is my last night here. I circle the hotel and conjure stones, dust, soil... I coast down corridors... I waft about the restaurant... I seep through the kitchen door... I hang in reception like muzak...

"Remember you must live.

"Remember you most love.

"Remainder you mist leaf...

"I am hanging falling breaking between this word and the next."

This is all really well done. It's a chapter that's full of energy, but also full of pathos. It never hurts to be reminded that we have just one life, and then we lose it. So it's up to us to use it...



The fifth chapter gives us the stream-of-consciousness thoughts of Clare, Sara's sister. We've already met her in a previous chapter, when she enters the hotel to try some hands-on experimentation with the liftshaft that killed her sister, and meets some of the other characters in the novel. But the fifth chapter is hers and hers alone. Again, there's considerable pathos: Why does no-one want to use the word dead, she wonders; and why is it that she talks to her sister all the time now, whereas when she was alive, they hardly talked at all? Her sister is always in her thoughts. When she eats a piece of toast, she does it slowly, "so I will remember for you what it tastes like..."

The problem with this section is that it's nigh-on impossible to read... No full stops (at all). Lots of ampersands. Odd gaps in the lines. I get that it expresses Clare's headlong grief. And it's definitely moving. But I would have appreciated something a little more conventional...

The last chapter is another memento mori. We start with a lovely description of an early winter's morning. Daily life goes on. But we're not alone:

"Morning. Already some of the ghosts are out and about..."

The girl at the watch shop remembers Sara, although she doesn't know she's dead. She remembers pretending not to notice her: "She doesn't know why she did that. It seemed the thing to do. She wasn't ready. The timing was wrong..."

And the book concludes like this:

"Morning. One bird lands, then another. The tree shakes slightly. Rainwater jolts off the branches and falls, a miniature parody of rain."

And then there's a repetition of those watchwords, gradually getting more scrambled:

remember
you
must
live

remember
you
most
love

remainder
you
mist
leaf

WOOOOoo-
hooooooo
oo
o



So that's all good. Would have been better with punctuation. But elegiac. Mournful, but boldly so.

But then, in the middle, we have three chapters that introduce three different characters, all connected with the hotel, and all tangentially connected with Sara. And although it's all very clever (Smith is always clever), the chapters felt like harder work, and diffused the simple, eminently relatable message of the Sara chapters: Remember you must live.

We have Else, the homeless woman, who has a patch near the hotel. She's a reminder that it's a tough world, stratified, unforgiving, and bleak for many. Else's terrible cough; her refusal to use the "shelter" unless she absolutely has to ("it is a room full of deafening sleep, the coughing, snoring and shouting of dozens of sleeping or out of it people..."); the sense of competition with the "grey girl" who has moved in opposite (Clare, but we don't know this yet); and her constant vulnerability -- it's all well painted. There's plenty of irony: "She likes to wrap relevant things around her feet. BRITAIN MASSIVELY MORE UNEQUAL THAN 20 YEARS AGO. ONE IN FIVE PEOPLE LIVES BELOW BREADLINE. These subheadings are cushioning her heel..."

Then we meet Lise, a receptionist at the hotel. Actually, we meet her "some time in the future". Lise, out of kindness, and also out of a sort of rebellion against the sanitized, restricting, hierarchical world of hoteldom, offers Else a room for the night. Else, a little disturbed and out of it, leaves her bathtap running. The bath overflows, and the water that floods the room does damage that costs GBP 373.90, which will have to be stopped out of the final paycheck of the chambermaid who last saw to the room, as she is the one who is blamed for the incident, and is sacked. But that's all in the past now, and Lise is laid low with some debilitating illness. Smith describes her utter bone-weariness so effectively that you end up feeling weary yourself... (Smith actually suffered from chronic fatigue syndrome for a time, and you feel she must be drawing on this experience.)



Thirdly, we meet Penny, who's a journalist, and is spending a night at the hotel. She's doggedly unsentimental, but her chapter also takes us back to the ghosts. She's watching some sort of televised seance, and the guy leading the thing reports one spirit saying, "I'M not dead... Don't call ME dead!". So Penny wonders: "All the people who have ever died, still here; ranging and loping over the earth and all its countries, bobbing about in steerage crowds wider than the seas themselves, or standing in bulky lines jammed all over the world like nose-to-tail cars on three-lane motorways into London and packing the cities, towns, shops, offices, rooms, even maybe this hotel room, standing behind their invisible wall and beating it with their fists and all of them soundlessly shouting it, WE'RE not dead! Don't call US dead!" This (and the final chapter) reminded me very much of The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, that brilliant book by Shehan Karunatilaka, and the gloriously deadpan line: "You have one response... for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts."

Penny encounters Clare and Else (again, they're not exactly introduced, but we know who they are). Initially, Penny takes Else for someone glamorous: "Some kind of druggy eccentric guest or maybe even a minor ex-rock star." This is, of course, because she's in the hotel... Penny wouldn't ever have thought this if she'd met Else on the pavement... She takes Else up to the floor where Clare is trying to detach the plate of the dumbwaiter shaft, and later follows the homeless woman on one of her night rambles: "Each time they found a window whose curtains were open and whose lights were on, the woman stopped outside it and stood by the gate where she could see." Penny is a bit of a hard case. She finally twigs that Else lives on the street. She gives her a cheque -- only to later cancel it, as she tucks into her room service club sandwich.



There's lots to like here. Most of it is very vivid. (Penny is probably the exception, the only figure who feels a bit like a cardboard cutout, but Else's cough makes you shudder...) There's a constant playing with words: Else's lack of breath makes her abbreviate everything ("spr sm chn?"); and she, like Sara's ghost, forgets the words for things. But she also has a quirkiness of sentence construction that sometimes ends up being quite profound (when Penny says she's lost, Else replies: "It's good. That way, you're probably not still going to get it... If you know you are... Then you're not about to be it, lost"). Lise, meanwhile, tries to get a grip on the right words, struggles to figure out the officialese of the forms she has to use to claim benefits, and recites words (advertising jingles) as comforting mantras. And Penny? She writes a ridiculous puff piece about the hotel, full of bland words that are utterly meaningless.

But somehow, for me, this felt like two books. One a moving little meditation on loss and grief and the terrible shortness of life; the other a political treatise on the brutishness of capitalism, the inequality of the world we live in, and the shallowness of the media. The bifurcation didn't quite work for me. You can't exactly argue with the socio-political commentary. A hotel like this makes a great symbol: It's a literally stratified world; and people can literally fall right through the big hole in the middle of it. But there's a sad delicacy about one part, and a slightly tedious heaviness about the other.

Perhaps this is why Hotel World seems to have divided critics. For one blogger, the novel is "stylistically dazzling"; for another, it's "a clever and empathetic look at isolation, connection and empathy"; a third closes: "I could go on and on giving examples of how ingenious I believe Smith’s work to be."

On the other hand, the Kirkus reviewer says, rather condescendingly, that Hotel World "may touch some but will seem mainly airy to others", adding: "One feels as though Smith were taking as long as possible on as little as possible to make things seem as important as possible." The New York Times reviewer criticizes "flabby language, lame jokes and whiny pretension". Ouch... And a BBC reviewer sums it up as "challenging". Like me, she didn't take to the "36-page chapter in which a single sentence runs and runs without stopping", and found everything that followed that first exhilarating chapter a "disappointment".

I like to be humble in recording my impressions of books. It's always possible I'm just not getting something. So I have to flag the comment by Giles Foden: "I have never seen the tenets of recent literary theory (the impossibility of the coherent subject, or substantive character, for instance) so cleverly insinuated into a novel."

Foden admits, though, that "many readers will find Smith's a difficult book to swallow". And that's basically my take: I swallowed half of Hotel World with great satisfaction and an aching sense of wonder, but found the other half sticking in my gullet like a difficult mochi.