[In the following review, Dallat argues that although the stories in Finbar's Hotel (written by Johnston and six other Irish authors) share common settings and characters, each piece is unique and strong enough to stand on its own.]

The characters who occupy seven rooms on the first floor of a down-at-heel Dublin hotel manage, simply by keeping out of each other's lives despite frequent and silent corridor confrontations, to create a vivid picture of a multi-layered, complex modern city, whose inhabitants and passers-through are as prone to loneliness as those in any other national capital. As a concept, this flies in the face of received notions of Dublin, from Joyce through Behan, Cronin and Donleavy to Dermot Bolger himself, the instigator and one of the joint authors of Finbar's Hotel; notions which imply a gregarious interconnectedness, and insist on seeing Dublin as a macrocosm of the parish; and it also undermines, oddly, the sense of Irish writers as a gathered community which is implicit in the invention and structure of this intriguing book.

Thus, while Finbar's Hotel presents itself as a literary puzzle—with its seven authors (the others are Hugo Hamilton, Jennifer Johnston, Joseph O'Connor and Colm Tóibín) asserting, contrary to custom, their right not to be identified in relation to the individual stories—the book's real interest is in the extent to which its collaborative nature both questions and, in the end, affirms the Romantic notion of the solitary artist, in spite of its interweaving of plots and retelling of incidents from opposing perspectives. And, although the structure—events played out in a single night in Dublin, retold in a variety of literary styles—obviously pays homage to Joyce as the progenitor of Irish city-writing, the work itself resists the narrative coherence of the novel generally; it must be seen rather as a themed collection of short stories.

The hotel itself represents the modern jerry-built city and its small-time transients as surely as its burnt-down predecessor, the original Finbar's Hotel, stands in the recollections of the employees and guests as a symbol of a vanished world of powerful party bosses, back-room clientelism, police compliance and clandestine off-duty clerical activities. Rumour has it that the fire in the old hotel was allowed to complete its work unhindered, for insurance purposes. The central story, in which the hotel's history is divulged, is rich with the obsessions which permeate Bolger's work, bibliophilia, frustrated sibling pre-sexuality, political corruption, long absences in England and mental illness. On the other hand, a returned drug-pusher hints at Joseph O'Connor's familiarity with the London-Irish demi-monde, while the easy intimacy with the great and the good reflects a Colm Tóibín view of Ireland; John Farrell, the night-manager, has, we are told, spent childhood Sundays on the carrier of the bicycle of the hotel's founder, Finbar FitzSimon, travelling to the President's residence in Phoenix Park where Finbar would converse in Irish, in the kitchen, with de Valera himself.

The author of the central section, whether Bolger himself or not, seems to be most intrigued by the literary parlour-game aspect of the enterprise, in a story peppered with allusions to the seven authors. Passing reference is made by the fictional characters in this piece to the autobiography of the father of one of the writers, to a pop-video featuring the sister of another, to a photograph taken by the hero of another writer's novel and to a court case heard by a fictional judge from yet another. This game-playing is for the aficionado; few readers will catch all the allusions, and, beyond a general awareness of, say, Charles Haughey and de Valera, it is not necessary to know whether Eamon Redmond is a real member of the judiciary and Brian Lenihan a character from a Tóibín novel (or vice versa) in order to savour the dynastic sweep and emotional impact of the confrontation between the comfortable, prosaic ambitions of the employee who has made his way up and the personal and economic failure of the children of the hotel's former proprietor. As the central contribution, Room 104 in a corridor from 101 to 107, “The Night Manager” not only makes sense of some of the earlier hints and implications but points forward to characters who have booked into the later rooms.

The less emotionally complicated and less embroidered opening story, “Benny Does Dublin,” has Ben Winters, a husband from Roddy Doyle's disenfranchised North Dublin, buy himself a secret night out, “on the town,” in bars and restaurants which make him feel out of place and in the basement night-club where he merely feels old. His only social success is to invent an “authentic” Irish past with which to regale American visitors, a sharp comment on Ireland's place in the modern world. In “White Lies,” two sisters in the next room, the daughters of a Church of Ireland rector, meet at the behest of the one who has stayed in Ireland, and who hopes to remedy her sister's long-standing estrangement from their mother, a separation which has as its cause a secret, like that of so many families in Irish novels, whose revelation must be continually deferred. The two end their drunken and argumentative evening sharing the one salvageable good from their past and singing loud psalms into the night.

The rented room has long been a location for escape and examination of conscience in fiction—as has the trick of retelling the same events from another character's viewpoint. Guests here include a pony-tailed Londoner with convictions for drug-pushing, two Dutch journalists, a party of tanned and ageing Americans, a well-known criminal, a man who has kidnapped his partner's cat and a wife whose husband in Galway believes her absences are for cancer treatment. Her increasingly absurd lies (in “The Test”) to the American tour guide with whom she spends the night (she tells him that she is a nun) match his inventions and mask her own disappointment.

One returned exile reflects on her fireman father's failed attempts to extinguish the blaze in the original hotel and, recalling her unsatisfactory serial love-life in small-town America, telephones a boyfriend of thirty years back (“An Old Flame”). Her stay becomes briefly entangled with that of the cold and determined local villain who has—inspired, no doubt, by a John Banville novel and by the post-1960 influx of millionaires into Ireland—graduated to the status of art thief, but who now finds that his attempts to deal with the international market lead him into unknown territories. His conviction that any one of the other guests might be an undercover agent leads him to search their rooms. Baffled by the presence in the next room (that of the fireman's daughter) of the ledger of the Drimnagh Fire Station, he removes it, an action which causes the returned American to call for the police, one of whom notices a fake of a recently stolen Rembrandt on the master-criminal's bedroom wall. Although this does not lead to his discovery (the Gardal being as inefficient as they always are in fiction), it does thwart his plans to sell the real thing (Portrait of a Lady).

As significant as the hotel-guests are the ancillary characters, not just the night manager but the works outing in the bar, the “Michelles” in the night-club and the night porter, Simon, whose presence implies continuity with a long line of sagacious servants in Irish literature. In addition to the aliases and alibis most of the characters use as a precondition of their being in the hotel, the collection abounds with fakes: the Rembrandt reproduction, Ben Winter's false famine history, the “nun”'s story, a decoy suitcase; a clear warning against attributing any of the stories too confidently. Although the crisp, stark prose in which the “Doyle” character's story is conveyed is highly reminiscent of Doyle himself, and the two FitzGibbon sisters in the next room are clearly from traditional Jennifer Johnston stock, pastiche may be as much a part of the venture as the imaginative structure itself. The writing embraces the thriller, the picaresque romance, the “twist-in-the-tail” short story, the existentialist hero, the roman-à-clef, the Big House novel and the urban “dirty realism” of present-day Dublin writers. The themes, sisterly rivalry, hypocrisy, clerical abuse, domestic ennui, returning prodigals and their discomfiting effect on those who stayed, are all to be found in Joyce's Dubliners as long ago as 1914.

There is a temptation to see these pieces as reinvigorating the Irish seanachie tradition of oral recollection and embellishment, tales building one on the other around a contemporary “fireside” (literally in the case of the old hotel), but despite their amicable cross-references and the aura of gamesmanship, the lasting impression is one of isolated “garret” writers describing a fragmented world, where the shared communal values of 1950s and 60s Ireland (however fraudulent, corrupt and hypocritical those values proved to be) have been replaced by urban alienation and indifference. Seen in this light, Finbar's Hotel offers a lively and likeable vision of an unlovely modern world.