Death hotel
Over the past week I read only one book purely for pleasure, and to write about here. The rest I read because reviews had been commissioned, and for a judging panel on which I serve as one of the judges. That meant reading a mountain of books to compile a shortlist. What could be more enjoyable? The rest of my time has been taken up with packing.
My desk has never been so uncluttered. Only my laptop and mouse remain; there are no towering stacks of books anymore. Everything has been packed away. There's a lot to be said for minimalism, I realise: we're living quite happily with bare walls and only the books we absolutely need. We're only moving in the middle of August!
Room 706 by Ellie Levenson
The novel is set in London. It's a thriller that unfolds over the course of a single day, apart from the flashbacks to the past.
Kate is the kind of character you can really sink your teeth into, so to speak. She was the product of a one-night stand and never knew her father. She and her mother were extremely close. Her mother was killed in a car accident while Kate was at university. After that she had no family left, only her childhood best friend, Eve. In Italy she met Vic: half-Italian and carrying his own emotional scars. They married and settled in London. He is the perfect husband and later becomes the ideal father to their two children. He worships the ground she walks on. It's all very well having such an angel for a partner, but the downside, if you ask me, is that it inevitably casts you as the less perfect half of the relationship. Still, that's something one can live with.
Through her work, Kate interviews the director of a company. There's an undeniable spark between them, and he invites her to lunch so they can continue talking. Afterwards he invites her to his hotel. As an exhausted, emotionally frayed mother of young children, Kate has long fantasised about checking into a hotel and simply sleeping through the night. She and Vic are still happily married, and he helps with the children, but with lively little ones constantly climbing into bed, there's hardly any room left for a sex life.
She ends up sleeping with James, the director, in his hotel room. He's married too, and they establish the ground rules: neither of them is allowed to fall in love, they don't want to know much about each other's lives, they simply want to meet like ships passing in the night and have sex—in broad daylight.
Afterwards she feels re-energised and once again capable of facing her life as a working mother. Every few months they meet in another anonymous hotel room. In between they have no contact whatsoever. James is attractive, mysterious and, she thinks, much posher than she is. Their encounters are elegant and passionate. She regards them as time set aside for herself, as much a form of self-care as a spa day or a beauty treatment.
Until the day they become trapped in the room when a terrorist group takes over the hotel.
At first they can follow events on the news until the electricity is cut off. Outside they hear sirens and helicopters. They still have a Wi-Fi signal. Kate constantly messages Vic on WhatsApp, telling her unsuspecting husband that she'd only ducked into the hotel to use the bathroom, and then hidden in one of the rooms. He encourages and reassures her.
Now she's trapped in a dark room with a man she realises she barely knows. She decides that she doesn't even like him very much. The terrorists occupy the lower two floors, and nobody knows how many people are still inside the hotel. James and Kate have to remain absolutely silent and avoid attracting any attention. James wonders whether they should have sex again, but Kate tells him it's over.
Interspersed with the scenes in the hotel room are flashbacks: to how she and Vic first met; to the death of her best—and only—friend, Eve, from cancer, a loss that reopened the trauma of her mother's death and left her utterly bereft. Vic had always been there for her. There are also glimpses of her children: demanding, exhausting, and utterly irresistible.
Later that night they have no idea what's happening outside, how far the negotiations have progressed, or whether they will ever be rescued. When you're balanced on a knife-edge like that, your life comes into sharp focus, as does the kind of person you've become. There is plenty of regret and remorse, longing and anger. And naked fear.
The ending is fairly open-ended, which works well. This is exactly my kind of book: apart from the stage provided by the protagonist's imagination and memories, everything takes place in a single room over the course of one day. I think it would make an excellent film.
At the back of the book Levenson explains how the idea for the novel came about:
The idea for Room 706 came about when my children were very young. I was so tired that all I wanted to do was to go to a hotel, shut the door, and be by myself for a short time, with no one making demands on me or wanting to touch me. When I told people this fantasy, they thought perhaps I was saying that I wanted to go to a hotel with a lover. They didn’t seem able to get their head around a mother’s need for some time alone. In fact it became apparent that for many people the idea of a woman taking a lover was far more socially acceptable than the idea of her being alone.
Room 706 by Ellie Levenson is published by Headline Publishing Group and costs R405 at Exclusive Books.
