[Emma Tennant] has added another sample of her own brand of sci-fi fantasy to her first two, The Time of the Crack and The Last of the Country House Murders. Somewhere she has referred to her 'trilogy', so that Hotel de Dream may be intended as the last of her laughing-gas murders. Be that as it may, plenty of old English attitudes get murdered in this latest offering of hers and in her own wittily and elegantly lethal way too. Perhaps one needs to read the book more than once to catch the relevance of its satire on every point and to make up one's mind what it is really all about (apart from being a different way of writing a novel). On the surface at least, it is clear enough all the same.

Yet even if it weren't, the book's chief attractions would remain unimpaired: the agility and ebullience of the humour, the sense of the absurd in human beings—in most of us, at least, and in all the inmates of Mrs. Routledge's tatty boarding house in Kensington, her Hotel De Dream—and, best of all, the stylish verve of the writing.

Here the reader lives mainly in the dreams of the characters, but since this is a form of science fiction, dream life and waking life get muddled up, while the dreams of the various characters also start to invade one another. The opportunities this offers for satirical fun and fantasy are naturally as good as unlimited, but also the opportunities to build up fantastic scenes, settings and set pieces.

This Mrs Tennant achieves with great ease and gusto and especially with her chorus of giant female nudes caked with sand from the seashore—woman with a 'sense of collective will-power' which makes a mere male shudder—who at one point in her Miss Scranton's dream seem like nothing so much as all that pink flesh in Ingres's Le bain turc come to baleful, militant life.

There is imagination of a higher and subtler order in such scenes than in other more obvious, yet highly diverting, satirical dream situations. (pp. 40-1)

Mrs Tennant [also] invents another sort of dream—the novel as dream. For one of the occupants of the Westringham Hotel is a lady novelist (guess who?—your guess) who is having trouble with a couple of her characters. Indeed, they are having trouble with her and, impatient of her arbitrary power over their movements and fate, plan to murder her.

This is really quite different satirical territory—less generalised—and it does not seem to fit in with the rest quite happily. I take this to be a fault, though a minor one, in a book which is otherwise written with the wit and expertise we have come to expect of Emma Tennant. I liked, too, the idea of the climax coming, as it should, before the end, although this may contribute to the novel's seeming a little less shapely than its forerunner and a little too long. For all that it is a mere 190 pages.

Does this novel amount to much more than an excellent example of contemporary cleverness? I don't think so. The fun here, however, is so intelligent and funny that one would be a fool to miss it. Mrs Tennant's book also contains reminders of modern man's and modern society's tendency to regress to infantility as did the two fantasies that went before it, and is accordingly a necessary warning. (p. 41)