Checking out of the Hotel Euthanasia
Gerard Graham
Ringwood, £9.99
In its author’s words, “a humorous book about assisted dying”, this debut novel from a Glaswegian now living in South Carolina opens in the year 2033, following some unspecified events which have pitched the country politically leftwards.
Rab Lennon is taking part in a football match between Glasgow Communists FC and Glasgow Anarchists United of New Scotland when he finds out his parents are dead. Far from simply going on holiday without him, they had actually booked into the Hotel Euthanasia in the tiny nation-state of Villadedino to have their lives terminated so that their pensions could be redirected into the coffers of the Party, thus making them martyrs to the cause.
Raised in a Communist household, and usually to be found wearing no-nonsense socialist denim, Rab has never doubted either his parents’ political convictions or the right of individuals to die at a time of their own choosing. But the self-sacrifice of his mother and father shatters his faith in both, and he is sent hurtling into the arms of the main opposition, the Roman Catholic Church, where a scheming bishop moulds Rab and a small handful of his gormless mates into a terrorist cell. Their mission is to travel to Villadenido, pick up some explosives and strike a blow against the godless advocates of assisted suicide by detonating them in the Hotel Euthanasia itself.
Given its edgy themes, and some digressions into the ethics of suicide and the philosophy of the saint after whom Villadenido is named, Checking Out of the Hotel Euthanasia, perhaps unexpectedly, leans towards the more knockabout end of the comedy spectrum. Rab’s mates are stupendously thick, their quarrels moronic and the scrapes they get into increasingly farcical. With the exception of Rab, they’re one-note comic turns. Even journalist Mark Goodwin, who has personal reasons for investigating the hotel, struggles to come to life, though he should be the most relatable character besides Rab. The efficient, emotionless Angela, who keeps the hotel running like clockwork, has her moments, but the best-used character in the book is probably the hotel’s owner, whose preferred method of communicating is to relate homilies, the point of which no one ever quite understands. There’s also a nice walk-on part for a sadistic, manipulative guest who whiles away a few minutes before his scheduled suicide by dressing up as the Pope and messing with our heroes’ heads.
But if subtlety and rounded characterisation aren’t Graham’s highest priorities, he does endow his novel with a more sophisticated level of irony, first seen when the revival of the anarchist football team is attributed to the arrival of one Billy McGlinchey, who bolsters their performance with “ideas of hierarchies of authority, systems, processes and corporate marketing”, and throughout the book underpins the ideological tussle between proponents of assisted suicide and the Church.
Graham’s jokes miss or overshoot the mark almost as often as they hit it, but the contrast between the provocative themes and the madcap comedy essentially works, forming a backdrop for some memorable set-pieces.
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