Will Wiles, The Way Inn (2014)

It's come to something when postmodern work like this—an absorbingly Ballardian tale of life in those temples of simulacra, high-end corporate chain hotels—is best described as old-fashioned. But old-fashioned, in a queer way, Will Wiles's gem of a novel is. Once upon a time Modernism was the new, and the post-modern glimmered on the cusp of futurity. And then, like turning a corner in Jameson's Westin Bonaventure Hotel, it's suddenly behind us. It was the future for fifteen-minutes. Now it's so last century. There's something significant and, it strikes me, even beautiful about that larger fact, if only because I'd suggest 'the postmodern' still informs and horizons so much of modern life. Mirrors can be flashy and obvious, or weirdly inconspicuous. The pomo dazzle ship is anchored right in front of us, and we unobserve it. The point may be that 'we' have put postmodernism behind us, because 'we' are more comfortable that way. It's still our world, though. It's still where we live. I daresay I'm an outlier here, taste-wise: still plugging away at my own twisted version of the Jamesonian Pomo. I do so because it still seems to me relevant and eloquent. I may be wrong. At any rate, I'm predisposed to like this kind of novel, when it is done well. And Wiles does this novel very well indeed.

Name-checking the simulacrum, there, licenses me to talk about the book's many family resemblances, though I do so not to deprecate its own distinctiveness and originality. One of the pleasantly non-Euclidian aspects of postmodernity is its understanding that originality is achieved through intertextuality, just as sincerity is reached through the Alice's-path of irony. 'Way Inn' is the name of a chain of global hotels catering largely to the travelling businessmen and conference trade. Our hero, Neil Double, loves staying in them; loves the anonymity and predictability, the blandness and the comfort. Prefers staying in the Way Inn by the Excel Centre in East London to staying in his own flat, a few streets away. His job is attending boring business conferences so that his clients don't have to, and at the moment he's at a conference of companies that organise conferences. This sort of recursive 'Ministry of Administrative Affairs' humour runs right through the novel; but it's more than just throwaway comic affectation. Recursion is the Big Theme, and Wiles handles it well. So, he takes his Accidental Tourist, or Up In The Air premise, writes it with a precisely observed, slightly prissy tone that dwells on all the little details of contemporary work-travel life (something like a more British version of Coupland); and having done this, he launches the whole artefact into the universe of Smallcreep's Day. That's a spoiler, I suppose; although Brown's novel is obscure enough for it not to eat into your reading pleasure. I was also reminded of James Lovegrove's early fiction (Days especially, but also The Hope), a little of Borges, and rather more of The Prisoner and Christopher Priest. There's a miasma of Murakami too, though that's quite a common thing in fiction nowadays.

There's real meat to this pared-down vision; lots of observations that chime true so far as your experience (or mine) of staying in this sort of hotel is concerned. Wiles is good on the epiphenomena; on the strange, derationated aura of sexual possibility such hotels generate; on the way their very blankness provides a weird relief from authentic lived experience. The 'twist', if that's the right word, isn't too hard to intuit; and this perhaps means that the first 200 pages are a little too leisurely. Wiles prose is good, but since it trades on a particular kind of precision, or attention to detail, those places where it falls from this high standard are more distracting than they might otherwise be. Sometimes Wiles observations spool on, outstay their welcome, lose their pithiness; and he has a provoking habit of splitting his infinitives ('I felt a strong impulse to simply forget the incident', 111), getting his subjunctive wrong ('...as if this mutual sound was a medium in which we all swam' 77) and using 'enormity' when he means 'enormousness' [249]; though fair play to him, he knows that 'congeries' is a singular form as well as being a plural ('a congeries of spheres', 186). And the novel builds to a splendidly Escher-y, Inceptionesque conclusion. Much recommended.