No other hotel in this town renews as many mattresses as we do This I know for a fact

No other hotel in this town renews as many mattresses as we do This I know for a fact. Ishiguro's chief vehicle is the deadpan monologue, self-important with accretions of detail heaped together to impress the wide-eyed listener. The Mitteleuropa setting, undercurrents of unease, hints of tragedy, late night to-ings and froings from hotels, a kind of aching, subliminal sadness - all are reminiscent of Powell's early novel Venusberg (1932), and never more so than in the incidental strainings for comic effect. Disgusted by Boris's childish interest in football, for instance, Saunders sternly suggests that he should plan for a useful career, "start learning about wall- papering, say, or tiling". Shortly afterwards, queueing for an ice-cream in a cinema, Ryder is surprised, or rather unsurprised, to find the saleswoman offering him a home decorating manual. The cinema visit, along with the subsequent society dinner, begins to foreground some of the anxieties undermining the city's life, the problems with Brodsky, a celebrated though bibulous conductor, and the thought expressed to Ryder by a city elder that "your agreeing to come to our humble city may prove absolutely crucial to us".Oddly, the Powell comparison endures. On a twilight stroll, Ryder and Boris become detached from Sophie.

After wandering by chance into an old schoolfriend of Ryder's named Saunders, they are rescued by Hoffman junior and returned to the hotel after a visit which Hoffman pays to an elderly lady named Miss Collins.Slowly, digressively, some semblance of a story unfolds.If The Unconsoled has any constants, they are perhaps a reliance on arcane symbols and the build-up of tension. The strangest thing of all is Ryder's simultaneous sense of bafflement and omniscience, and his sense of participating in the novel even as he unravels it, as if he were playing in a football match that he was also commentating on.And so on, through another 400 or so strikingly opaque pages. Before very long it becomes clear - if anything can be said to become clear - that Ryder and Sophie have some sort of relationship, although Boris is apparently not their son. This is compounded when Gustav pops up once more to ask if Ryder would mind interceding with his daughter Again the whiff of anterior knowledge hangs on the wind. Despite characterising himself as an "outsider", Ryder is dimly conscious that he knows Sophie and Boris from somewhere, even to the extent of remembering a previous conversation about moving house. Innocuous though these requests may appear, they carry a sharp sense of foreboding. Hoffman junior, meanwhile, also booked to play at the concert, anxiously solicits some professional advice.

By what can only be an act of telepathy, the musician divines that the old man is worried about his estranged daughter and her son, Sophie and Boris.Downstairs, Hoffman, the hotel manager, is keen to show his wife's collection of press-cuttings to Ryder. She is a devoted fan of his work, and the cuttings form a summary of his career. Escorted to the lift by Gustav, a punctilious elderly porter, Ryder is immediately treated to an inconsequential five- page monologue (the lift inching upwards all the while, presumably) on the vagaries of the portering life. With Ryder installed in his room, the reader gets his first inkling of the obscurities and concealed entrances with which the book is strewn.