A jewel of the North (Part 2)

Hotel World. By Ali Smith. Hamish Hamilton. 238pp, £10.99 in UK

Dermot Bolger started something with Finbar's Hotel. What better ready-made structure for a novel than a series of rooms under the one connecting roof, with all those hotel guests' lives briefly criss-crossing each other? Ali Smith focuses on five women characters in her hotel novel. There is Sara, the chambermaid, who falls to her death in a hotel dumb-waiter; Else, the girl who begs outside the front door; Lise, the receptionist who gives Else a bed for the night; Penny, the journalist overnighting from a job; and Clare, Sara's sister, who returns to the hotel to see where her sibling died. All their lives connect, and their five different individual stories, told in turn, create the bigger and engaging story of the novel.

Smith experiments - very successfully - with form and structure in Hotel World. She uses a stream-of-consciousness style, which she manages to make both surprising and interesting, attributes not usually associated with that tired genre these days. Smith treats language like something physcial, and tangible. When Sara loses her life she also loses her grasp of vocabulary. She narrates her chapter as a ghost - "What is the word for heated up bread?" Else keeps warm by wrapping newspapers around her feet. Lise is ill, and trying to concertina a description of her life and illness into a hospital questionnaire. Journalist Penny makes her living from words. Clare simply has no words at all to describe the impact of her sister's loss. Hotel World is clever and deep, as labyrinthine with ideas as the network of hotel corridors - and is also a unexpected love story.

Rosita Boland is an Irish Times journalist