There But for the...
Ali Smith revels in language and why it matters. God help a translator! At the centre of this multi-layered story is the appearance at a dinner party of a young man whom nobody really knows (he has been brought along by a man he has only once met, a man who didn't want to come in the first place). Miles Garth gets up between the main course and the dessert and goes upstairs. Everyone assumes he has gone to the bathroom. Instead he has locked himself into the guest-room and doesn't come out again for months. At first his complacent and philistine bourgeois hostess Genevieve Lee is distraught. Later she capitalises on his presence having told, or sold, her story to the press. Crowds gather; the gardens outside that back bedroom window become a focal point for a sort of perpetual fairground, T-shirt vendors, spiritualists, food stalls...
No one, least of all the reader, knows Miles Garth and nor should we because that is not Ali Smith's point. She leaves a lot out - look at the title, after all. We never learn why he locked himself in to begin with nor why he decides to leave when finally he does. This is not his story. He is the catalyst for snatches of other people's stories - the man who inveigled him to the dinner party, a precocious nine year old girl, an old woman with dementia...
The impermanence of any moment of existence, its meaning within the flow of time, people's relations with and to one another against time, what history is and is for, what people are and are for, and how truly awful some of them turn out to be...all these are subjects of this book. It is gripping; thought-provoking; delighting in its wit and cleverness - not least in its consideration of cleverness, something that tends to be a fraught matter in the UK where it doesn't do to be too clever. It is moving. If there is a weakness it is in the central scene - that dinner party up to which and from which all that emerges moves: Ali Smith so enjoys herself writing her savage satire of certain contemporary attitudes and manners of expression that she can't let go, and the scene slides into stereotype, losing rather than deepening its bite. But I shall now read more of her all the same.
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No one, least of all the reader, knows Miles Garth and nor should we because that is not Ali Smith's point. She leaves a lot out - look at the title, after all. We never learn why he locked himself in to begin with nor why he decides to leave when finally he does. This is not his story. He is the catalyst for snatches of other people's stories - the man who inveigled him to the dinner party, a precocious nine year old girl, an old woman with dementia...
The impermanence of any moment of existence, its meaning within the flow of time, people's relations with and to one another against time, what history is and is for, what people are and are for, and how truly awful some of them turn out to be...all these are subjects of this book. It is gripping; thought-provoking; delighting in its wit and cleverness - not least in its consideration of cleverness, something that tends to be a fraught matter in the UK where it doesn't do to be too clever. It is moving. If there is a weakness it is in the central scene - that dinner party up to which and from which all that emerges moves: Ali Smith so enjoys herself writing her savage satire of certain contemporary attitudes and manners of expression that she can't let go, and the scene slides into stereotype, losing rather than deepening its bite. But I shall now read more of her all the same.
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