Hotel de Dream is only hand-me-down Flann O'Brien, noticeably tireder than its master. The depressed gentlefolks of the grotty Westringham Hotel eagerly quit their pongy domicile … in rather obviously needful dreaming. The dreams' casts take to travelling from dream to dream and when a lady novelist arrives to complete her trilogy her characters pop in and out of both the real and dream life of the hotel….

The only person Emma Tennant appears really to get into is a revolutionary whose Sixties career and politics she carefully describes but who is made to have precious little to do with the rest of the novel's doings. (p. 87)

Valentine Cunningham, in New Statesman (© 1976 The Statesman & Nation Publishing Co. Ltd.), July 16, 1976.