Hotel World brings five very different women together, one of whom is . . . well, a ghost. Their lives cross one evening at the Global Hotel: Else is a beggar, who sits coughing on her pitch between the hotel and World of Carpets; Lise, a receptionist, is about to succumb to serious illness; Penny, a well-heeled journalist, is a guest; Sara Wilby, a talented swimmer and diver, worked as a chambermaid until she was killed in a tragic accident; and Clare, her tortured little sister, is trying to find out more about her death.
This is a disturbing, many-layered book, through which we learn of the women's dreams and inner lives. After her death, Sara's ghost finds her senses beginning to shut down. Her memories are fading, her heart is silent ("I miss the noise it used to make") and she forgets words. She is left with a consuming desire to know how far she fell in the dumb waiter - which she had crawled into as a joke - as it plummeted to the basement floor.
Ali Smith's writing is haunting and acute. There is much play on the differences and difficulties between "word" and "world". Lise frets over whether a word she cannot remember has two syllables or three. Clare ponders on the number of words that make her feel as if she's sinking into them. Else asks Penny if she knows the meaning of "rebegot" (from John Donne's "A Nocturnal upon St Lucy's Day"), which puzzled her in the library. "Nope. Never heard of it. It looks foreign. French?" Later, Penny - who thinks that a light object and a heavy one, if dropped from the same height, will fall at different speeds - will draw a blank in her spellcheck and thesaurus, and therefore assume the word doesn't exist.
Penny works for the broadsheet World on Sunday. She types "classic", "ideal", "flawless", "immaculate" into her computer while watching the hotel porn channel. After complaining about the lukewarm bathwater, the scrape marks on the wall, the slightly worn carpets, the unimpressive tea and coffee, the watered-down shampoo and the creaking bed, she writes her piece. She ends with a flourish: "World Perfect awards the Global chain nine out of ten. Effortless style and an effortless visit. A superior stay." Penny, too, has problems with the word/world, but either doesn't realise it or lies as if the truth didn't matter.
Hotel World might have been depressing were it not for the invigoratingly sharp writing. It ends on a note of hope, as Clare finally manages to time her sister's fall: "I still can't believe how fast you were less than four seconds just under four three & [sic] a bit that's all you took I know I counted for you . . ."
The dead can now rest, and the living can get on with living. "Remember you must live," says Sara, in an inversion of Muriel Spark's last phone message in Memento Mori.
