The Way Inn

October 13, 2014
Prime among the reasons people pay the man who calls himself Neil Double to serve as their "conference surrogate"âsomeone who attends trade fairs in their stead and relays the useful bits without the blatherâranks dodging tedium, a challenge also presented by the first half of this sardonic but wildly uneven sophomore effort from Wiles, author of Care of Wooden Floors. Things seem to start promisingly for narrator Neil as the young Londoner prepares his game plan for Meetex, ironically a conference for conference planners, at the monstrous new hinterlands MetaCentre and adjacent Way Inn. But then Neil is blindsided by the organizer's attempts to shut him down, And then by an even more ominous problem involving theWay Inn itself. At this point the novel morphs into a surreal Inception-like nightmare which has Neil and mysterious titian-haired temptress Dee fighting for their lives against the globe-spanning "inner hotel" and its ghoulish agent Hilbert. Wiles makes many spot-on observations about the ways in which environment can shape perception, as well as the blanding influence of branding. But the bloated story and largely cartoonish characters never really come together.

September 1, 2014
Kafka updated to the 21st century. Neil Double has an unusual profession-he's a conference surrogate, so he spends his life substituting for those who either cannot attend or are not interested in attending conferences. While his life is not carefree, he is able to revel in the relative anonymity of lobbies, hotel rooms, canned music and superficial social encounters. His particular favorite place to stay is a chain of nearly identical hotels called "The Way Inn" (like Double's name, a self-conscious pun), and the latest conference he's attending is with Meetex, a conference about...conferences. Trying to drum up some business, Double has a conversation with a Tom Graham, eagerly explaining how conference surrogacy works, but it turns out that Graham is actually Tom Laing, event director of Meetex. Laing then publicly rails against conference "pirates" like Double who attend conferences on behalf of others and whose "doubling" can actually replace several other attendees and thus hurt business. Double feels he's been had, especially once he returns to The Way Inn and finds out his conference pass has been voided, so he can no longer access his room or the bus that ferries conferees to the MetaCentre where the Meetex conference is taking place. Double finds out how quickly he becomes a nonentity when he no longer exists through his laminated pass, and his attempts to "unvoid" his pass become both comic and surreal. Meanwhile, he's trying to track down a woman named Dee, whose interest lies in photographing the abstract paintings on the walls in various Way Inns because "they are an approximation of what a painting might look like, a stand-in for actual art." Wiles has a guileful-dare one say wily?-intellect and provides a telling commentary on the emptiness of much of modern culture as Double and Dee find that The Way Inn has the same infinite structure of nightmare as Kafka's Castle.

COPYRIGHT(2014) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.