When William Trevor died in 2016 I was reminded that I really hadn’t read enough of his novels. On a trip to Waterstone’s a few months ago I noticed a range of William Trevor novels from penguin – I liked the simple black and white images on the covers – but it was the title Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel that really spoke to me. Novels set in hotels are great. The truth is I should have liked this novel more than I did (I didn’t hate it or anything – I just didn’t love it and felt I should have). Mrs Eckdorf in O’Neill’s Hotel was short-listed for the 1970 Booker prize – and despite feeling distinctly underwhelmed I have to admit that something of the mood of the novel has really stayed with me. There is a lot to admire in this beautifully written novel – so perhaps I was simply in the wrong frame of mind.
We first meet the annoyingly intrusive Mrs Eckdorf on board a plane on her way to Dublin from Germany, as she recounts her life story to the man in the seat next to her. A twice married, middle-aged photographer, Ivy Eckdorf is a producer of large coffee table books – in which she has explored the desperate lives of communities in a variety of locations around the world. She had heard about O’Neill’s Hotel in Dublin from a barman – he had described the inhabitants, the hotel’s faded glories, and it had fired her imagination.
“In the pillared hall of the hotel, with its balding maroon carpet that extended up the stairs, eight chairs echoed a grandeur that once had been. They were tall, like thrones, their gilt so faded and worn that it looked in places like old yellow paint, their once-elegant velvet stained with droppings from glasses of alcohol. Behind the row of chairs prone on the carpet lay a man into whose rump O’Shea’s boot was now driven with force. His eyes watched as the shrimpish form of his enemy Morrissey moved swiftly, without speech, across the hall and out of the hotel. O’Shea continued on his way to the kitchen, his greyhound loping behind him. Agnes Quinn and her companion came down the stairs. Early morning in this house wasn’t ever much different.”
O’Neill’s hotel has certainly seen better days, owned by 91-year-old Mrs Sinnott, a collector of orphans, a deaf-mute woman who prefers to communicate with the aid of a notebook. Everyone speaks to Mrs Sinnott through her notebooks, the notebooks piled up on a table near the chair she sits in by the window. Every conversation is recorded, all that the people in her life can’t or won’t say out loud is written down. Now the hotel is home to a collection of misfits and degenerates – ‘run’ after a fashion by Mrs Sinnott’s drunken, gambling son Eugene – a dreamer, allowing the hotel to slip further into ruin and disgrace.
Mrs Eckdorf turns up, she has already begun to tell herself the story of this hotel. O’Neill’s is not used to receiving ordinary customers, so Mrs Eckdorf turning up and asking for her luggage to be collected from another hotel so she can stay – causes some mild surprise. There is O’Shea, the porter followed everywhere by his greyhound, trying his best to hold it altogether, Morrissey a pimp who hires rooms at the hotel for his girls and Agnes Quinn one of the prostitutes who once longed to be a nun.
In other parts of the city we meet Enid Gregan; Mrs Sinnott’s downtrodden unloved daughter and Philomena; Eugene’s former wife and their son Timothy John. Mrs Eckdorff tracks down these people too – not content with the inhabitant of merely the hotel – she senses a story – and she is keen to find it. Enid’s husband has managed to leach every bit of potential joy from Enid’s life. An insurance man, trying his best never to have to pay a claim he is currently most interested in the growing of his tomatoes, seeing great potential in them.
“He had bought a small plot of ground a few miles from where they lived and he had just erected on it two glass-houses in which he proposed to cultivate tomatoes for profit. He had come back one evening and asked her if she’d ever noticed tomatoes in the shops. ‘A full chip when you go by in the morning,’ he’d said, ‘and an empty one when you come home at night.’ The plot of land had been paid for out of capital left to her by her father, as had the shed he had built in the garden and the concreting in the yard. Earlier in her marriage to Mr Gregan she had once or twice protested at his way of appropriating her money, but he had pointed out that it was essential to invest money in a sensible manner rather than to purchase clothes with it, or household luxuries that would wear out quickly. He had a way of speaking about such matters over a period of several weeks, making his point after tea every evening when they sat down by the fire.”
Timothy John works for Mr Gregan, it is interesting work but he is hasn’t quite Mr Gregan’s ability of quickly dispensing with insurance claims with a few well-chosen barbs. currently Timothy John’s biggest concerns involve a bad molar – and the necessary resulting trip to the dentist, and talking once more to Daisy Tulip.
“She was beautiful, he had thought, and ever since he had been thinking the same. The work he did, the people he saw, his uncle’s reproaches and his mother’s little face made little sense now when he thought about her. There was a passion in him that made even his fear of speaking to her again seem strangely slight. Her name is Daisy Tulip, he had written. He laughed to think of it, a name like that, a made-up name that suited her.”
Back at O’Neill’s as preparations for Mrs Sinnott’s 92nd birthday get underway, we begin to see Mrs Eckdorf’s own unravelling. What is it that turned a once plush hotel into a house of ill-repute? Ivy Eckdorf is determined to get at the story – she worms her way into the lives of these sadly bemused people. In unravelling the secrets of O’Neill’s, Mrs Eckdorf shows us her own vulnerabilities.
William Trevor’s writing is beautiful, Trevor’s characters are explored so well – the communities depicted are faithfully drawn and yet I didn’t always feel a connection between them.
