Finbar's Hotel by Various New Island Books 273pp, £9.99
Publishers, it seems, are the last citizens on the planet to appreciate the imprudence of judging a book by its cover. It is extraordinary the lengths to which they will go to contrive a saleable gimmick, the tortuous conceptual paths they are prepared to navigate in order to arrive at something they imagine will sound neat on a dust-jacket.
Never mind that there have been so many bombs associated with novelty novels, and other forms of artifiction, that the Anti-Terrorist Squad has started to take an interest in the genre. Publishers persist in the fatuous belief that a little hocus-pocus in the front flap blurb will so dazzle readers that they'll be too dazed to notice the quality of what's on the pages inside.
Fortunately, Dermot Bolger, the Paul Daniels behind the seven-card-trick that is Finbar's Hotel, has had the good sense to recruit some fine writers to act as his . . . erm . . . beautiful assistants. The hotel bellhops are, in alphabetical order, Bolger, Roddy Doyle, Anne Enright, Hugo Hamilton, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O'Connor and Colm Toibin.
Finbar's Hotel is a sort of roman-a-clef in which the clefs unlock the doors to seven rooms along a single hotel corridor, and the roman is a collection of seven short stories about the goings on behind those doors. There's an element of blind man's buff involved, in that the stories are unattributed, and the reader must identify the author of each one while remaining mindful of the possibility that the writers may well be disguising their own styles or trying to counterfeit the styles of one another.
The eponymous hotel in which the action takes place, over the course of a cold October night, is a dilapidated "cube of weeping concrete" on Dublin's quays, somewhere within eyeshot of Heuston Station. According to Simon, the decaying, vodka-swigging porter who wanders between stories carrying a tray and a tragic narrative thread, Finbar's Hotel once boasted a "PPP rating", indicating that it was a safe house for discrete gatherings of priests, policemen and prostitutes. Finbar's Hotel the book scores no more than a lone "P" for passable.
None of the writers are singing at the tops of their voices. Only two of the stories could stand up without the cohering glue of the central conceit. The remainder are alternatively pedestrian, tedious or twee, and some manage to be all three. Great effort and ingenuity have clearly been expended in the interweaving of detail and incident between chapters. The authors must have operated with the aid of maps, clocks, compasses and till receipts, so flawlessly do they succeed in pulling this trick off. The problem is that there is scant evidence of such ingenuity or effort in most of the actual storytelling.
An innate reluctance to risk framing anyone for a crime they may not have committed restrains me from nailing names to stories. Nevertheless, I'll bet both my elbows that Roddy Doyle is responsible for "Benny Does Dublin", a tale of mid-life crisis that's doublechinned with humour and pathos. I'll make a similar stake that Colm Toibin penned "Portrait of a Lady", a quietly unnerving stroll around the mind of a crime boss drifting out of his depth, who may or may not be The General. Elsewhere, the author of "White Lies" (Anne Enright?) is to be commended for, if nothing else, capturing perfectly the sound of lift doors opening: "Bump. Tick. Ping".
Finbar's Hotel is a canny marketing exercise which has got people talking about contemporary Irish literature, and for that alone it deserves applause. However, it also serves as a useful reminder that not everything pulled out of a conjuror's hat has the legs to hop like a bunny.
Liam Fay is a writer and critic; his book, Beyond Belief, was published earlier this year