The Way Inn by Will Wiles
My rating: 3/5 cats
People often choose a hotel room as the place to end their life. Did you know that? It’s a consideration in the design of the light fitting, and some of the other aspects of the room, although not one we’d admit to. Maybe they do it because they know the body will be found, it won’t rot undiscovered in a one-bedroom Docklands flat. So the hotel becomes an ante-chamber of the morgue.
welcome to the way inn.
this book is presented as a high-concept, slipstreamy bit of fun: like the house in House of Leaves, this one’s got a hotel bigger on the inside than it is on the outside, there’s a half-finished bridge leading nowhere, a mysterious woman who disappears and reappears at unexpected times, some bending of the laws of physics, and a lot of wry playfulness in its premise and puns.
neil double is our antihero. he works as a conference surrogate – an ingenious concept where his company sends him out to attend conferences so that their customers can get all the benefits of attendance without actually having to go though the hassle and tedium of being there themselves. neil grabs the tote bags and pamphlets, takes notes on the panels and presentations, and makes the first steps towards networking and business card exchange while his clients never need to leave the comfort of their own homes.
and neil loves his job, especially the part where he gets to stay in hotels all the time.
Of course I still have to deal with the rigmarole of actual attendance, but the difference is that I love it . . . I love to float in that world, unidentified, working to my own agenda. And out of all those generalities I love hotels the most: their discretion, their solicitude, their sense of insulation and isolation. The global hotel chains are the archipelago I call home. People say that they are lonely places, but for me that simply means that they are places where only my needs are important, and that my comfort is the highest achievement our technological civilisation can aspire to.
neil is well-suited for hotel life. the allure of the hotel was imprinted on him at a young age, and he has retained his appreciation of the arrangement, with its inherent possibility of fleeting and superficial encounters, and all the trappings of the conference and hotel scene: the gentling muzak, room service and maids who provide an extended childish freedom from having to cook or clean, conference nametags to remind him of the names of people he has slept with at previous conferences, the way that everything is disposable or replaceable. oh, and the showers.
neil goes through life like a tumbleweed, sexually casual/careless and misogynistic, cynically opportunistic, never getting too close to people – just passing though. by choosing to inhabit the controlled sameness of hotels, he begins to blandly blend in, which is perfect for his job, but doesn’t make him a very dynamic character. he exists in the between-time, waiting patiently and passively for his next move.
The cause of this sort of hold-up was rarely made clear, it was just more non-time, non-life, the texture of business travel. Hotel lobbies and airport lounges are built to contain these useless minutes and soothe them away with comfortable seats, agreeable lighting, soft music, mirrors and pot plants.
(NB – this is a british novelist, so “pot plants” does not refer to that kind of pot. stop being teenagers, americans. unless you are teenagers, in which case – carry on)
neil’s favorite hotel chain is the way inn, which is comforting in its ubiquitous meeting of expectations; its prefab and temporary banality. at the start of the novel, he is attending the ultimate conference called meetex, which is a conference about conferences for conference organizers, and staying in a brand new way inn, which from the start, is less pleasurable than what he is accustomed to.
The tube lights flickered and stuttered – an item on a contractor’s to-do list, one of the hundreds of glitches that infest new buildings. Plasma rolled in the tubes. Sometimes it’s new buildings that have ghosts, not old ones; new buildings are not yet obedient. New buildings are not yet ready for us.
the metacentre, where the conference is being held, is also brand new, and the pedestrian bridge that will one day connect the hotel directly to the space is unfinished – extending outward from each building with an empty gap between. from the first day of the conference, neil runs into unprecedented difficulties, many of them seemingly mundane – difficulty navigating the hotel corridors, a malfunctioning clock radio, a glitch in his keycard. but then everything gets worse. neil’s job, hell – his whole life, depends upon anonymity. he is just there to be the “double,” to pretend to be someone he is not. but suddenly things start to unravel for him, he is exposed and ostracized, and this conference becomes a surreal, kafkaesque nightmare. which is probably redundant, but whatever.
neil finds himself drawn into a claustrophobic psychological adventure, in which he will discover the sinister flipside to comfort and convenience, the small horrors in ordinary things, he will learn how so much depends upon a bus pass, and will eventually uncover a conspiracy that shatters his entire conception of the hotel as place of comfort and soothing expectation.
and it all comes down to a woman.
neil considers himself to be a scholar of hotels, aware of all of the small details and contrivances that make them effective
The lift doors were flanked by narrow full-length mirrors. Vanity mirrors, installed so people spend absent minutes checking their hair and don’t become impatient before the lift arrives. Mirrors designed to eat up time… A small sofa sat in the corridor near the lift, one of those baffling gestures towards domesticity made by hotels. It was not there to be sat in – it was there to make the corridor appear furnished, an insurance policy against bleakness and emptiness.
but then he meets a woman who knows even more than he does; a woman he has seen before – a different time, a different way inn.
they perform the necessary glib banter of the hotel bar:
‘I’m sure I would have concluded by saying hello,’ I said. ‘You know, when you’re in a hotel, unlikely to see a person ever again, where’s the harm?’
‘Yeah, I’ve noticed guys are less inhibited about striking up conversation in a hotel bar. Guys in general. In hotels in general. I’ve always assumed there was some slow-witted male equation at work. Unaccompanied woman in hotel bar equals prostitute. Or slut, anyway.’
This remark didn’t seem to be pointed at me, so I smiled in response. ‘Could be. For some men.’
She shrugged. ‘It’s a building that also contains beds. Maybe that confuses them. They think, well, this woman is already sleeping somewhere in this building, surely it won’t make a difference to her what bed she’s in or who’s there with her.’
‘I think it might be related to my anthropological conclusions,’ I said. ‘Where’s the harm? There’s less danger of lasting social embarrassment from saying hello to a stranger in a hotel bar, because if it turns out badly you can go and hide in your room and the next day you both check out and that’s that. It’s a completely disposable moment. And prostitution promises a similar deal, in its way – it’s completely disposable sex, no lasting traces, no aftermath.
and although She was wise to the way hotels put sex on the brain, posing themselves as convenient selection boxes of beds and genitals, she eventually overcomes her dismissal of his advances and shows him what the hotel really is.
and then things get crazy.
and despite all the crazy, the problem with writing a book about how soul-sucking the travel experience is, even if the narrator doesn’t find it so, is that the reader has to experience it at the same time as the character. i will say wiles does a really good job in these long beige descriptive passages of endless hotel corridors and the superficial bonhomie of the conference experience, and he really brings that weary feeling to the reader, but after a while, it’s just … soul-sucking.
there are so many hallways.
it’s a little crazy at the end, and i don’t think it ever lives up to its potential for true scariness, but it’s mostly fun and engaging, and a really fast read, once you get through all those hallways. and if you have ever been to a conference or stayed in a hotel, it will definitely make you think.
3.5 stars cats.
