Waiting in hotels for men to come and go

Eimear McBride’s new novel – a salute to Samuel Beckett – is her most readable yet, finds Cal Revely-Calder

One test of a decent stylist is whether their prose could be cut. Eimear McBride is an arresting writer, but her novels do nothing just for show. Among the best things, in fact, about A Girl Is a HalfFormed Thing (2013) and The Lesser Bohemians (2016) – stories of sexual assault, and sexual pleasure, and love affairs lanced by reality – is how smoothly they absorb you, despite their unusual styles and the anguish they describe.

Girl is about an Irish teenager damaged by abuse and the plight of a brother she loves; Bohemians follows a similar girl to London, where she becomes entwined with an older actor with a differently brutal past. To “harrow” is to unearth by violence, with people as with fertile ground, and both Girl and Bohemians are harrowing books, in a present and active sense. McBride’s narrators go on spilling their words, unfolding themselves to themselves and trapping us in earshot, too.

Take this passage, from Bohemians:

Through quiet Liverpool Street he carries my bag. Quiet concourse. Stansted Express. Quietest platform. Loneliest journey I know. I’ll miss you, I say Will you write? If you want. Or you want. Then I’ll want, if you will. All I want though is to tell you how much I No, go, or you’ll miss your train.

STRANGE HOTEL

Often, it’s thanks to its tightness that her dialogue rings true, and the above is McBride at her sparse and heartfelt best. It isn’t how people speak in other novels, but that was why James Joyce and Samuel Beckett pushed the form: to figure out how to portray the way that words can fail us, and beautifully.

For nearly a decade, McBride was unable to publish Girl; were it not for the small press Galley Beggar, one of our leading contemporary novelists would still be writing in the dark. But it eventually appeared, and won the Goldsmiths Prize, the Desmond Elliott Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. When Bohemians followed, three years later, it didn’t get its due – it’s a better book – but it eased its way into longlists and shortlists and its share of praise.

And now, here’s the 43-year-old’s third novel, this winter’s talk of the town. The plot of Strange Hotel isn’t much more complex, in terms of the skeleton of events, than its predecessors were. A woman travels the world, stays in hotels, has casual encounters with men in some and not others, and narrates it all to us. Eventually, a memory of a past relationship begins to dominate, as her control over her assignations appears to slip away.

Reading Strange Hotel, however, you might at first do a double-take. It isn’t as stylistically abstruse as the pair of novels that came before. Take a passage such as this:

McBride still has her weird eye: a smoker at night is seen in ‘ribboning profile’

Next door zips his case up and she is recalled. To head hanging, hand wringing, the whole medley of awful. It’s too soon to reframe last night as a blank but she’ll try to just as soon as she can. Because that is the plan.

This isn’t so far from what teachers call “good English”. In other words: thoughts arranged by