The Way Inn

Prime among the reasons people pay the man who calls himself Neil Double to serve as their "conference surrogate"%E2%80%94someone who attends trade fairs in their stead and relays the useful bits without the blather%E2%80%94ranks 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. (Sept.)