FICTION: There But For The, By Ali Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 356pp, £16.99
STYLISH, WITTY , offbeat and consummately likable, Ali Smith has perfected a narrative tone ideally suited to her wry, intelligent fiction. Yet another of the talented Scottish writers, Smith is a shrewd observer, loves facts, is playfully, if astutely, alert to nuance, and never takes herself too seriously, which explains why she can hold a reader with the lightest of touches.
The cautionary irony conveyed in the title of her new novel is sufficiently beguiling to encourage one to stretch across a bookshop display and claim a copy. Better still, it all begins with a meticulously planned dinner party that goes wonderfully wrong. An ultrasmug hostess allows a friend of a friend, more of an acquaintance, to bring a guest he barely knows to her home. So far, so tolerable, until the guest, “between the main course and the sweet”, excuses himself and leaves the table.
He doesn’t return from the bathroom; instead he locks himself into the beautifully decorated spare room and refuses to leave. It is brilliant. The hostess is in turmoil – after all, a restored 17th-century door is at stake, and it would be such a shame to have to break it down.
“The fact is, imagine a man sitting on an exercise bike in a spare room. He’s a pretty ordinary man except that across his eyes and also across his mouth it looks like he’s wearing letter box flaps. Look closer and his eyes and mouth are both separately covered by little grey rectangles. They’re like the censorship strips that newspapers and magazines would put across people’s eyes in the old days before they could digitally fuzz up or pixelate a face to block the identity of the person whose face it is.”
Miles, the guest, has had enough of life, never mind the meal. Few contemporary novels begin with as much subversive flair as Smith's clever comedy, only to collapse like a soufflé and heave and bluster midway. There But For Thedoes find its second wind, but it never recovers the timing that steers the opening sequence.
It is no coincidence that Smith is a good short-story writer, and this loosely conceived and overly relaxed novel feels like a collection of good short pieces that have been sandwiched together instead of being allowed to become individual works. But before it all falls apart Smith is at her best when telling the story of Miles, the man in the spare room.
His self-imprisonment makes the news, and he acquires iconic status. Every cause that needs a hero looks to Miles Garth. Of course, he has his reasons, none of which makes immediate sense to his distraught hostess, the appalling Genevieve “call me Gen” Lee, who wants him out of her home.
On examining her guest’s jacket she finds the name of a contact and takes action. This brings Anna, a newly redundant liaison officer who has been helping refugees (or rather cleaning up awkward messes caused by the abuse of refugees), into the action. For this sequence alone, Smith’s novel is worth reading, just about.
Anna ranks among the best characters Smith has yet devised. Two days after Gen’s ill-fated party Anna is standing at the spare-room door, attempting to lure out a man she has not seen for more than 30 years. Before she arrives at that door, though, she meets a precociously intelligent little girl named Brooke, with whom she converses. Again the dialogue is brilliant. Anna asks the child: “Aren’t you hot in all those clothes?” Brooke, the true hero of this novel (which could have been so good, and isn’t), assures her that she is not uncomfortable, “because I feel that I am not doing myself full justice if I don’t wear them all”.
Logic and a pleasure in information sustain the little girl, much as they do the haphazard narrative. When Anna attempts to remove her own jacket, Genevieve Lee, we are told, stares at it “for an unnaturally long time”. Her reaction is obvious: “I now have a horrible fear that people who take their coats off in my house might never leave my house.”
Meanwhile, Brooke remains intent on being involved. Gen tells her that she can hear Brooke’s mother calling her, but Brooke is firm: “I can hear nothing that resembles what you suggest, Mrs Lee.”
Anna begins to recall the time, as teenagers, when she knew Miles. It is a touching, odd and engrossing section, but then Smith looks elsewhere and focuses on Mark, the picture researcher who brought Miles to the party. Mark spends most of his waking hours speaking to his long-dead artist mother, a beauty whose suicide coincided with that of Sylvia Plath.
One can’t fail to notice that Smith has pumped up the novel with anecdotes and cross references, and also makes good use of Greenwich and its association with time, not least because of the royal observatory.
When the action, such as it is, actually returns to the ill-fated dinner party, the writing loses much of its verve and lightness, becoming laboured and not very funny.
Suddenly we enter the thoughts of May, an old woman whose dead daughter, Jennifer, knew Miles. There are moments of pathos and beauty, but too often Smith leaves the reader wondering why she did not simply write a continuous stream-of-consciousness novel. Perhaps she has. It is not quite clear.
Regardless of how lopsided the narrative is, as it dazzles and creaks along on a wave of good humour, young Brooke, lonely and clever, is there. She keeps notes about everything: “Imagine if all the civilisations in the past had not known to have the imagination to look up at the sun and the moon and the stars and work out that things were connected, that those things right in front of their eyes could be connected to time and to what time is and how it works.”
When Miles disappears Brooke decides to write his story and, true to the wonder that is this engaging girl, speculates that he may have made his escape from the spare room by riding the exercise bike over the rooftops.
No, this is not a great novel, burdened as it is by stupid adults, but Ali Smith at her best, flashes of which elevate this whimsical yarn, is always good company.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
