Dolly Considine’s Hotel by Eamon Somers

The summer of 1983 – Dublin, Ireland 18-year-old aspiring writer Julian Ryder (aka Paddy Butler) learns his older brother George is coming home (after four years busking across Europe) to sell his jazz record collection and to celebrate their mother’s 50th birthday. But the precious 78s have already been sold to finance Julian’s planned summer holiday with his best friend, whose parents confiscate the proceeds just hours before George’s arrival. Julian needs a refuge where he can be safe from his brother’s anger. At Julian’s age (1955) Dolly Considine was ready to follow her father into politics and to implement her ideas for building a modern Ireland free from the civil war bitterness which divides her from either of the McClean brothers who might wish to marry her. She will not accept either of them until she is older and successful. However, her father’s shame, her lover’s agendas, and her own fierce independence keep her trapped in the loss-making hotel left to her by her aunt, leaving Dolly destined only to provide accommodation and late-night drinks to the politicians who should have been her colleagues. The reliably narrated story of Dolly Considine’s Hotel is interwoven with Julian Ryder’s Summer of Unrequited Love – populated with interpretations and misrepresentations of the actions and motives of the people he meets in the hotel (where he now lives and works as a lounge assistant), and even the eulogies that might be written about him should he die at the hands of the people he’s upsetting with his stories. Dolly Considine’s Hotel is about waiting, is about sexuality and pregnancy, is about the Irish Civil War, nationalism, and pragmatic politics, is about artistic purity and artistic licence, reliable and unreliable narrators, alcohol and jobbing civil servants, and above all is about Dublin and whether Julian will ever see Malone again.