This Ghost Story’s Colorful Quintet of Voices Grapples With Life and Death

HOTEL WORLD

A Novel

By Ali Smith

Anchor Books

238 Pages, $12 paper

“Hotel World,” the much-hyped novel by Scottish writer Ali Smith, short-listed for England’s Booker Prize last year and just now making its American debut, is a five-voice ghost story. Though the work features only one authentic ghost, the remaining characters might as well be apparitions, so deadened and dispirited are their tales. The result leaves one wondering what all the fuss in England was about.

In this neo-Gothic tale, the interconnecting stories are linked by the hotel of the title--the thoroughly generic Global Hotel in an equally generic English city--where 19-year-old Sara Wilby worked for a brief time and died. Having made a bet with a co-worker that she could fit into the dumbwaiter, Sara plummeted to her death in less than four seconds when the supporting cable broke. The quintet of narrators that carries the story forward have all been affected, directly or indirectly, by this death and take turns bending the reader’s ear with their own tangential tales.

The ghost of Sara is the first narrator, floating in the gap between life and death. The colors she can see are fading, and her grasp of common words is leaving. “I will miss smell,” she tells us. “My feet.... The bright packaging round foods. Small coins that are not worth much, the weight of them in a pocket or hand.”

A distinct entity from Sara the corpse, the ghost cajoles the corpse into letting out hints of information by torturing her with songs from popular West End musicals (“All I want is a room somewhere/far away from the cold night air”), and Smith sometimes too hits a few high notes.

But unfortunately, the promise--that Smith’s writing skill and pointed humor will consider the transitory nature of life--is never kept. Like Sara’s drop, it’s all downhill from there.

The next narrator is Elspeth, a homeless woman who sits near the entrance of the hotel asking passersby for spare change; she tells her story of the hardships of homeless life juxtaposed against her childhood. Elspeth has lost most of her ability to carry on a conversation having, like Sara’s ghost, misplaced common words. But her thoughts, at least, are deep: “Poetic darkness,” she ponders, “has an extra E, as if a longer kind of darkness than the ordinary kind, and a capital D. Darknesse. Essence of Dark.”

Lise, the hotel’s receptionist, takes pity on Elspeth and offers her a room for the night. This act is less out of compassion than to get back at the faceless corporation that employs her. Lise’s story, which vaults into the future, tells of how she will soon be so incapacitated that she’ll be unable to do anything but wait for her mother to show up and care for her. This jump in chronology is jarring because the narrative never catches up with that future; it serves, however, to remind readers that no one can escape fate. In “Hotel World,” each character is given a short burst of contentment--as brief, say, as a hotel stay--before the bitter nature of life resumes.

Then we have Penny, a self-obsessed journalist staying at the hotel who spends an evening traipsing the countryside with Elspeth. Penny is a shallow, utterly unlikable character--at one point, she tries breaking her laptop for the fun of it--who adds little more than insipid details to the story.

As part of her evening’s entertainment, Penny meets up with Sara’s younger sister Clare, the bereft sibling. Clare narrates a section of the novel, written without punctuation or paragraph breaks, that relies monotonously on the ampersand to carry the weight of transition. Clare’s whining about the death of her sister, instead of earning her the reader’s empathy, serves to distance us even further from the tragic loss.

“Hotel World” frustrates and disappoints. Throughout, Smith plays with postmodern techniques, as if she needs to prove to readers that she’s on the edge when it comes to narrative style. The effect, however, is anything but welcoming. Like the hotel chain that features a huge spray of stargazer lilies in its lobby and boasts countless sister hotels with identical lobbies and identical sprays, the touches Smith employs are neither original nor interesting. Her narrators, after a few pages, sound the same. They snivel. They complain. They fret over their own personal concerns, as Sara’s spirit attempts--perhaps as the novel’s most notable ambitions--to understand the meaning of death.