Hotel Paradiso

Geoff Hamilton, a former columnist for the Queen’s Journal, is a
freelance editor and writer living in Thunder Bay.

Set in the Bahamas, Gregor Robinson’s first novel tells the story of
David Rennison, a Montreal banker and aspiring writer who has fled the
rat race to seek adventure and literary inspiration on sunnier shores.
The book alternates between Rennison’s diary entries and the lurid
narrative he constructs from them. The diary records the narrator’s
botanical interests and then his blossoming affair with a local woman,
while its fictive counterpart explodes with tales of adultery,
poisonings, murder, drug-running, espionage, and voodoo rituals.

As Rennison explains in one of his early diary entries: “I’m
writing a story about writing a story, about framing and organizing
events, describing real and imaginary people. Part of the series about
this place. I am writing to make sense of it all.” That conceit is a
little stale in the year 2000, but Robinson spices things up with enough
sun, sin, and scandal to distract us. His defining influence here, as
his explicit allusions make very clear, is Graham Greene, and
specifically The Comedians (1966), a novel set in Haiti and laced with
intrigues similar to those found in Hotel Paradiso. But Greene was a
master storyteller and Robinson has significant trouble keeping up with
him. This emerges most profoundly with Hotel Paradiso’s supporting
cast: we may come to care about Rennison, but he is, after all, only a
voyeur, and we need to know more about those he encounters and why they
matter if our interest is to deepen.

That caveat aside, there is a good deal to enjoy here. Robinson’s
austere style is gripping, and his plot clips along at a healthy pace.
The local color is, furthermore, quite vivid. If a little Caribbean
adventure is what you seek, then this book shouldn’t disappoint.