LITERARY FICTION
STRANGE HOTEL by Eimear McBride
(Faber £12.99, 160 pp) AT THE start of this slim, intensely absorbing novel about life after shattering loss, a woman loses her bearings in France. She has no interest in the country, has ignored her surroundings and not bought a map. Finally, she spies a bowl of matchbooks printed with her hotel’s address, and is able at last to locate herself.
This, in miniature, is the arc of Strange Hotel, in which McBride’s narrator moves between various anonymous hotel rooms, strictly policing her memory and trying to avoid its traps — the sight of a one-night stand’s naked back, for example. Like all McBride’s creations, she’s also addicted to words, and canny enough to know they’re her way of holding the world at bay.
McBride’s prose — boldly rhyming, viscerally urgent, blackly comic — is always a startling joy, and if, in the latter stages of this novel, she seems to be re-treading the territory of 2016’s The Lesser Bohemians, it ultimately matters little.
INDEPENDENCE SQUARE by A.D. Miller
(Harvill Secker £14.99, 240 pp) A.D. MILLER’S atmospheric, Moscow-set thriller, Snowdrops, was shortlisted for the 2011 Booker Prize, and he’s stuck close to his formula here. The setting is Kiev 2004, and in an icy Independence Square, beard-stroking diplomat Simon Davey is waiting to meet Kovrin, a billionaire crony of the president’s.
Simon’s aim — with the aid of young protester Olesya — is to avert a bloodbath over the corrupt election of Victor Yanukovych. That we know he succeeds doesn’t stall the plot, since a second strand picks up in London in 2017, where the unimaginatively unfaithful Simon is scraping along following a humiliating disgrace.
It’s a satisfyingly-structured yarn that suffers less from its lack of originality than from sporadic first- person interludes. In the case of Olesya — suddenly fluent in English — they’re jarring; while windily inflated Simon seems to belong to another era.
The result is that Kovrin, the deliciously pantomimic villain of the piece, rather steals the show.
A SMALL REVOLUTION IN GERMANY by Philip Hensher (4th Estate £14.99, 336 pp)
IT’S USUAL for a novel’s hero to change; to evolve and deepen as a result of the challenges they overcome. Yet ‘Spike’, Hensher’s self-christened and perhaps intentionally unsympathetic protagonist, prides himself on remaining true to his political principles while his former friends turn Tory and take over the establishment.
We first meet Spike in the early 1980s, when he falls under the spell of a student radical and is introduced to his Chilean lover, Joaquin. A second act takes place in East Germany in the late 1980s, while part three reunites us with Spike and Joaquin in the present day. By now, lecturer Spike has little to do with politics, although he’ll still vandalise posh estate agents.
Throughout, Spike is subject to a series of traumas, yet a breakdown is confined to a single, coy sentence. Moments of formal experimentation miss the mark, and Hensher fails to engage us sufficiently with the supporting cast, about whose fates we’re clearly meant to care.