Books we like ... and books we're not too fussed about
Ali Smith
Penguin 2006
This is the story of a Norfolk summer shaken up by a stranger. The Smart family are staying in a holiday cottage when Amber arrives. Eve thinks she’s her husband’s student; he thinks she’s her friend. She is neither. The novel is about the effect on him, on her, and on her children. It’s not an easy read, but there are things here which are very good indeed. What I found particularly effective were the parts told from the perspectives of the enquiring, intelligent, bullied twelve-year-old Astrid, and of her brother, five years older and tormented by having been the (sort of) unwitting bullier in an incident that led to suicide. Smith’s writing here creates a convincing insight into these troubled minds. Indeed, it is the inventiveness of her writing that distinguishes this book: her extended race through the late sixties and the seventies beginning I was born in the year of the supersonic, the era of the multistorey multivitamin multitonic, the highrise time of men with the technology and women who could be bionic … is a case in point, bringing together scraps of pop songs, news stories, films, and TV shows in an inventive way which will set all kinds of bells a-ringing in those of a certain age. Similarly, a cry of recognition will be prompted by even her most throwaway lines: the kind of meaningless tree that gets planted in the grassy areas of the car parks of supermarkets; cliché described as a structure seen in a fog, something waiting to be re-felt, re-seen; all the potential Eves that could have been if it hadn’t been for accidental twists of fate seen as arm-in-arm, doing a kicky Scottish dance. But it is this inventiveness, this virtuosity, this willingness to take risks, which spoils the novel for me in the end. Occasionally it’s just a little thing that jars (It was Britain. It was great. Oh yes, very good.) but sometimes it’s something more fundamental. Here in particular I would pick out the series of sonnets and other poems which attempt, both through their patterns of words on the page and the conventions of doggerel, to reflect the husband’s state of mind, as prime candidates for Pseuds' Corner. This feeling that form has triumphed over content spills over into the end of the novel too and makes it for me rather unsatisfying – which is a shame, because it is full of fine writing and perceptive insights – not least the shop that has a skull in its window with a plastic rat stuck in is eyehole. Yes, I’ve been to Norfolk villages like that.
http://www.contemporarywriters.com/authors/?p=auth91
31st May 2006
See also: The First Person
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