“There but for the” by Ali Smith:
Another book by Ali Smith, the sixth book of her I’ve read so far. And again such a very fine one.
One evening, at the home of the Lees, a quite posh, preposterous middle/upperclass family, at the invitation of the maddeningly, awfully conceited Genevieve Lee, people come for one of her annual “alternative“ gatherings in her elegant “certificated“ 16th century house in Greenwich. The dinner party does not go at all well in the way Mrs. Lee has had pictured it would. In between the main course and dessert one of the guests, Miles Garth, a pleasant, thoughtful and charming young man, until this evening unknown to the host, goes upstairs and locks himself in the spare bedroom and refuses to come out again. For months.
Mrs. Lee, because she believes herself to be a liberal-minded, understanding person, refuses to call in the police, but still wants it to be known how generous a person she is and how terribly, terribly she suffers from this interruption of her daily routine and therefore decides to talk to the News of her predicament. Soon after word gets out a camp of occupiers forms around the house and under the window where Miles lives, complete with oddballs and religious fanatics who only wait for “Milo“, their new involuntary saint, to show himself at the window. Which he does not do. This is the basic story and the start of a truly imaginary, clever tale.
The novel then splits into four sections: THERE, BUT, FOR and THE. Each section is dominated by one of four people who have been touched by Miles in some way before in their lives. There are connections that don't quite connect and apparent non-connections that do. The key characters are all of above average intelligence and have found out, in one way or other, that it can be quite hard to find a place in the world, especially if one doesn’t blend in with the mass.
There is the woman Anna who met Miles on a trip round Europe as a teenager 30 years before.
There is the man Mark who brought Miles to the dinner party in the first place, a 59-year-old gay picture researcher.
There is the woman May, old and dying, left alone by everything and everyone to pass away in a hospital. Miles, since the untimely death of her daughter, has visited her once a year to mark this anniversary. Her part to me was especially heartbreaking in its touchingly true understanding of how regret can define one's last days.
But the life and soul of the book is Brooke, a precocious child, the 10-year-old daughter of another couple who went to the same dinner party, significantly black, clever and, for her penchant and love for puns, often rather irritating to her environment. Brooke is the only one who sees the stranger in the spare room as a real human being rather than a nuisance, and who gets him to respond where others have failed simply by telling jokes. She is a true artist and the moral voice of the book.
The writing in this book makes reading an active experience. The text is stuffed with puns and punning, with wordplays, clues and riddles. The book plays with form, with structure and most of all with language. This is a book about storytelling, about how we communicate and how we connect or not connect with others. It is a novel that explores themes of identity as much as race, religion, class, and sexuality, and how the use and role of language shapes our definition of people or our perception of the world. The mirroring, unveiling power of language is all over and very present, for example, at the dinner party, an amazing, witty, chamber play that descends brilliantly into a comedy of drunkenness, sexual tension, pretentiousness, bigotry and envy.
A recurring motif is the increasing shabbiness, staleness and falseness of modern life with its dependency on the internet that "promises everything but everything isn't there" and that only offers "a whole new way of feeling lonely".
This is a beautifully clever tale, full of human life, from childhood to death. A clever novel that, for all its cleverness, is not boastful but touchingly warm.
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