Citation
Ingram, H. (2002), "Hotel World", International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, Vol. 14 No. 6, pp. 320-320. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijchm.2002.14.6.320.1
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Woooooooo‐
This is how Ali Smith’s qgty uirky and fast‐paced novel begins and ends. It takes as its starting point Muriel Spark’s Memento Mori (“remember you must die”), but later adds the more positive axiom “remember you must live”. Novelists have often used the hotel as a conveniently bustling and cosmopolitan environment, full of excitement and social interaction. Think, for example, of Arnold Bennett’s The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), of Arthur Hailey’s (1965) Hotel of Jeffrey Robinson’s The Hotel (1996). Hotels accommodate them all – rich and poor, famous and unknown, mainstream and peculiar.
The luxurious Global Hotel is set in an unnamed northern English city in which the characters are disembodied yet interconnected. There is Sara, a 19 year old chambermaid who has just died and her sister Clare who visits the scene of Sara’s death. The room opposite is occupied by Penny, an advertising executive and there is Lise, the Global’s depressed receptionist. Away from the swish hotel splendour is Else, who begs on the street outside.
The book title come from Lise the receptionist’s poem, to be called “Hotel World”, that was a metaphysical pun on the Global Hotel chain where Lise worked. For example, verse four of “Hotel World” went like this:
You once worked on reception In Control, my daughter dear. But now you find yourself checked in To your own Hotel Room, here. A room whose key’s mysterious, Whose view is strait and serious, Whose purpose is mysterious, Whose minibar is Fear.
Smith is strong on the detail and relentless continuity of hotel life, tacitly alluding to the tyranny of its practices and paradoxes. For example, Global Hotels (we think the world of you) operate laser set minibars in which items removed for more than 20 seconds will be automatically charged to room accounts. Or the case of the new chambermaid who had been sacked, ostensibly for uncleanliness, but really for suggesting that housekeeper Mrs Bell’s watchword (customer care) was two words.
Global Hotels are portrayed as rather authoritative employers who use surveillance cameras widely to check up on both staff and customers, and who even made it compulsory for employees to attend Sara’s funeral. (Who was running the hotel?) Global’s policy on design holds that “site duplication within still‐individual architectural structures reinforces attitudes of psychological security, nostalgia, and preserves the climate of repeated‐return in world‐wide Global clientele”. The aim of the Global quality programme is to “do things better and cheaper, in order to handle growth more easily, have happier customers, happier staff and happier managers”. The paradox is that the staff (perspiring in their uniforms made of 78 per cent polyester) have no idea what this means, other than it is something to do with the difference between good and bad and the need for better.
Smith’s style is not conventional or easy, but seems somehow in keeping with life in a gritty northern city. The contrast between the luxurious and ordered world of the Global and the poverty of Else begging outside is stark, and the hotel medium allows Smith to explore the big themes of love, death and capitalism. Reviewing a novel breaks new ground for the International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management, but so does this book. It is so rare that books about hotels win Booker prizes, so we should celebrate the fact. Try it!