“The Hotel New Hampshire” by John Irving (1981)

“The summer my father bought the bear, none of us was born – we weren’t even conceived.”

Hoo boy. Let’s crack on with this bizarre book.

Our narrator is John, the middle child of the Berry family. His father, Win Berry, becomes overwhelmed with the desire to run a hotel and sets one up in an abandoned school in their quiet hometown. Within the walls of the hotel, John and his siblings – Frank, Franny, Lily and Egg – will learn about life. But this is a strange life filled with circus bears, incestuous desire, and a tenacious stuffed Labrador. John’s life is anything but ordinary.

It’s hard for me to say much more about the plot than that as, well, there isn’t really one. Although connected, each chapter sometimes feels like a standalone adventure. While some are funny, such as the story of the bear that the family adopt, others are downright dark, featuring incest, rape, underage sex, disability, sudden death, bad taxidermy and racism. While funny, almost cute, in places, for a lot of it I just felt desperately disturbed.

I’m not ashamed to say that I skimmed the last third or so. It had all become too much for me. I like a vignette as much as the next person, but I needed more of a comprehensive story. Things happen, and it does all tie up, but at the same time there isn’t much really going on. John makes for an interesting narrator, being as eccentric as the rest of his family, but it doesn’t mean he doesn’t make me uncomfortable. There is some genuine tragedy, too, and it does tug at the heartstrings, but my takeaway from the book is simply the oddness and the obsession John Irving seems to have with sex in all its taboo forms.

While it is always interesting to see sibling relationships in literature – it’s a mine that seems relatively untapped to me – I’m not really sure how I feel about these ones. I’m also put roughly in mind of The Cement Garden by Ian McEwan, which similarly deals with eccentric siblings and an incestuous element. Although the explicitness of it is limited to one scene, that concept does permeate the book, and I think that’ll always be the first thing I think of when asked about this book in future.

Very strange content, but I like his writing, so I’m prepared to try Irving again.

“The Last” by Hannah Jameson (2019)

“Nadia once told me that she was kept awake at night by the idea that she would read about the end of the world on a phone notification.”

I never learn. Why did I think it was a good idea to read another dystopia during the rise of an international virus that the media are touting as the scariest thing ever? And why did I think that the same book would be a sensible thing to read while staying in a hotel alone all weekend, when it’s also a thriller set in a hotel? Suffice to say, my imagination ran away with me and I did very little actual reading in the hotel, although my podcast consumption shot up. It’s over now, so it’s time to review The Last.

While Jon Keller is staying in a remote hotel in Switzerland, the world ends. Major cities across the planet are hit by nuclear weapons and the Internet quickly goes down. Many people flee from the hotel, hoping to make it somewhere safe, but a handful stay behind. Jon is one of twenty survivors now holed up in the hotel. As a history professor in his previous life, he takes it upon himself to make a record of the end of the world. Fifty days after the bombs dropped, he finds a body.

Convinced that one of the group is a murderer, Jon sets about interviewing the other survivors, not all of whom want to join in with his theorising. As the days pass, suspicion grows and Jon finds that the vital clues he needs are going missing. He doesn’t know who he can trust, and tensions flare as the final pocket of survivors work out how they’re going to stay alive in the long term. But things get worse when they get evidence that they might not be the last people after all. They might not even be the only people in the hotel…

This is one of the tensest books I have read in a very long time. The end of the world is tragically believable, although we never find out exactly who began the bombings, it never seems to matter. The stakes are high and feel real, and you are wrapped up in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the hotel, with no idea what is happening outside. The events of the first day of the end of the world are revisited a few times, as Jon and others remember more and more about it. It’s almost funny when one of the fleeing guests deadpans, “Scotland’s gone”. Is this how we’ll be if it ever happens? The use of social media comes into play as well, from the opening line. For most of the novel, the characters don’t have Internet access, but when they do get some they learn that some people did indeed live-tweet the apocalypse.

The characters are a rich and varied bunch, with some getting a lot of page time and others just shining for a cameo, based on how much Jon speaks to them. He is, however, an unreliable narrator, consumed with toothache and a sense of self-importance. You can’t fault his drive regarding his desire to solve the murder, but there’s another part of you that wonders if he’s just going mad. There’s a sense of insanity about him and an obsession that sees him doing anything to distract from thinking about his wife and children. At first you believe him, but even as a reader you begin to doubt him as a narrator – is all of this just in his head? The others, particularly student Tomi, doctor Tania and head of hotel security Dylan, are shown only through Jon’s eyes, so we don’t know what prejudices he’s putting on to them. We see them as he interprets them, so we can’t know for sure if they really are acting in the way he says, or if it’s just paranoia. From what we do see, however, many of them do seem to be acting suspiciously, but the suspense keeps on ratcheting up and characters motivations seem to change day by day.

I’ve said this before, but I think I need to say it again. Until the news perks up and it doesn’t feel like we’re living in the end days, I really need to stop reading dystopian fiction, especially when it’s this visceral and real. An amazing book, but consumed by a bruised mind. I don’t want to put anyone off, because it’s a brilliant read, but take care.

Did you know that as well as reviewing everything I read, I also write novels, too? My books blend black humour with light horror, crossing genres with ordinary characters dealing with extraordinary circumstances. Head over to wherever you buy books to take a look at my two offerings. The first, The Atomic Blood-stained Bus, introduces you to a cannibal, an ex-god and the last witches of Britain, while the second, The Third Wheel, follows a man who is tired of being single while all his friends get married, but has a change of priority when aliens invade the planet. I hope you enjoy!

“The Way Inn” by Will Wiles (2014)

“The bright red numbers on the radio-alarm clock beside my bed arranged themselves into the unfortunate shape of 6:12.”

Although I’m not much of a traveller, I am familiar with hotels. Actually, I quite like them. Mostly, though, I end up in budget hotels of the Travelodge or Premier Inn variety, and am always struck by the similarity that exists between the chains, regardless of where you actually are. The homogeneous nature of them is somewhat comforting, but also more than a little creepy. They can feel like non-places, buildings that you don’t really belong in, and can never feel quite at home.

The Way Inn introduces us to Neil Double, a professional conference-goer. His company serves a singular purpose – if you don’t want to waste working hours at a conference, but still want to know what gets said, Neil goes in your place, making notes, reporting back, and doing all the face-to-face business himself. This time, he finds himself at a conference for conference organisers, staying in another comfortably familiar branch of the Way Inn hotel chain.

However, after attending a few stalls and talks, he discovers that his cover is blown, and the conference organiser, Tom Laing, is not impressed by his new business model, which he claims will lose them ticket sales if one man can do the work of many companies. Banned from the conference, a dejected Neil returns to the hotel. Maybe he’ll get to sleep with that woman, if he could just remember her name, or maybe he’ll find that mysterious redhead he once encountered in a Way Inn in Qatar. He’s seen her once this weekend, and he thinks she works for the hotel. She seems far more interested in the hotel artwork than him, though.

After a restless night’s sleep, and with no conference to attend anymore, Neil begins to explore the hotel further and soon he finds himself stumbling into a mystery so huge and so strange that he could not even have begun to believe it. His life is about to be blown all out of proportion as the art-loving woman starts making him question his own reality. Who paints all those pictures in hotels? Where does one buy clock radios by the thousand? And just what would happen if you exited your hotel room and, instead of turning left towards the lifts, you turned right, deeper into the hotel?

This story actually takes on a conceit I’ve had for ages about these sorts of places and runs with it to places far better, funnier, scarier and greater than I could ever have done. Wiles is a master at focusing on the minutia of the thing, and chain hotels seem to be the perfect places to emphasis the tiny details. The mirrors in the lifts to make us feel less alone; the sofas in the corridors that aren’t meant for sitting in, but instead just to make it look furnished; the courtyards that look like meditation gardens but are only used by smokers; the strange unstealable coat hangers and unopenable windows. The hotel is as much of a character as any of the humans here, and it’s one that I think all of us can relate to.

Far funnier to me though is the idea of a conference for people who organise conferences; companies that specialise in selling lanyards, tote bags or conference centres. The idea that there is an industry overseeing the meetings of every other industry is hilarious, but also almost certainly the case. The idea of Neil being a professional conference surrogate is also an entertaining one, and if the idea doesn’t already exist, then I can see it coming to reality in five or ten years. While moving from hotel to hotel to listen to speeches about things you don’t really care about doesn’t appeal to me, I daresay there would be people willing to do it, and even more willing to pay for such a service.

I spent the first third of the book hoping that it would become what I hoped it would become, and thankfully it did, and the novel you’ve ended with is nothing really like the one you began. But Wiles changes tone and genre so wonderfully that you don’t even notice, and everything seems so real and oddly familiar. It welcomes you in like the little green light that flashes on a hotel lock when your keycard is recognised, and you’re more than happy to stay for the duration.

It’s a great read, and you’ll never want to check out at the end. In fact, you might not be able to…