SOURCE: “Booking in to Dublin,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4930, September 26, 1997, p. 23.

In the following review, Dallat argues that although the stories in Finbar's Hotel (written by Johnston and six other Irish authors) share common settings and characters, each piece is unique and strong enough to stand on its own.

The characters who occupy seven rooms on the first floor of a down-at-heel Dublin hotel manage, simply by keeping out of each other's lives despite frequent and silent corridor confrontations, to create a vivid picture of a multi-layered, complex modern city, whose inhabitants and passers-through are as prone to loneliness as those in any other national capital. As a concept, this flies in the face of received notions of Dublin, from Joyce through Behan, Cronin and Donleavy to Dermot Bolger himself, the instigator and one of the joint authors of Finbar's Hotel; notions which imply a gregarious interconnectedness...