Guest who came to dinner

BOOK REVIEW

What is that one most important quality that any guest simply ought to have? Wit and intelligence? An accommodating and pleasant disposition? Or the good sense to realise when the party’s over and it’s time to go home? That any guest ought to eventually leave is undebatable. But what if he doesn’t? What if you can’t move him out of your house for days, weeks, months, if ever?

In her latest book, There but for the, Ali Smith creates an untenable situation that pulls the reader straight into the house of Genevieve and Eric Lee where Miles Garth, the guest, has ensconced himself indefinitely. Garth is a stranger to the Lee family and is there only as an acquaintance of an acquaintance to attend an annual alternative dinner party hosted by the Lees where they invite people who are a bit different from the ones they usually get to see. Their snobbery is revealed as Genevieve speaks of how once they had a Palestinian man and his wife, and a Jewish doctor and his partner over for what “resulted in a very entertaining evening”.

Only this time, the evening doesn’t quite remain entertaining when, in the middle of the supper, just before the crème brûlée is served, Garth stands up, goes upstairs and locks himself up in a spare bedroom in the Lee household. No amount of coaxing or cajoling will draw this unwanted lodger out. He won’t speak and he won’t respond in any other way. The only time he communicates is when he slips a note from under the bottom of the door to say, “Fine for water but will need food soon. Vegetarian, as you know.” Totally at their wits’ end, the Lees respond by slipping packs of paper-thin turkey and ham under the door for the vegetarian because they don’t want him to feel too at home. Breaking the door down is out of the question because the owners believe it dates back to the 18th century.

Thus begins a journey – at times anarchic, at times funny, at times exasperating – into the thoughts and memories of people whose lives Garth has been part of at some point of time or the other. Centred on this locked up mysterious, passive man, who is there and yet not there, are characters whose lives are as disjointed from one another as the title of the book — There but for the. On the face of it, the title is as fragmented as the plot but somehow it all just links up.

The book has four segments – “There”, “But”, “For”, “The” – each dealing with a separate character. There’s the Scottish 40-something Anna Hardie, who was, some 30 years ago, part of a group of 50 prize-winning British teenage writers on a Europe tour. That’s where she first met Miles Garth, with whom she loses touch after a few initial years. Now she finds herself “there”, strangely at the Lees’ house trying to get Garth out of their spare bedroom.

Then there is Mark Palmer, who had met Garth only a few days ago and had brought him along to the Lees’ dinner. His mother’s been dead for 47 years but her ghost keeps speaking, at times screeching, in his ear, making up rude rhymes. She doesn’t stop to let him be even when she cannot think of a rhyme (“if I had known, when I was twenty-four / that you’d grow up such a godawful bore / well – what rhymes with back-street abortionist?”). “Silence of the grave, my arse,” Palmer says to himself but knows deep down that her voice is only his desperate need for the mother who’d killed herself years ago. Another character is 84-year-old May Young, whose daughter died at age 16. Garth was her daughter’s boyfriend.

But perhaps the most fascinating character is a curious, precocious and free-willed child called Brooke Bayoude with an ability to ask uncomfortable questions at uncomfortable times and through whom puns get a free run. She has just moved into the neighbourhood with her parents and was at the dinner when Garth locked himself up. Brooke loves to play with language, the way Ali Smith does.

There but for the is an unconventional book and not just because it does not have a conventional plot. Smith’s immense fascination for language has her leaving all rules out. Don’t expect full stops, commas, semi-colons and exclamation marks where you would ordinarily expect them. Don’t expect the meanings that you would ordinarily give to words. Smith’s is a world where words fall against each other to take on their own meaning and at times form whole new words. Some would find this irritating — a linguistic escapade. But language is clearly an adventure for Smith, one that finds her exploring words down to their smallest meanings: “but the thing I particularly like about the word ‘but’, now that I think about it, is that it always takes you off to the side, and where it takes you is always interesting”. Or bringing out the ridiculousness of some phrases: “to rain blows” becomes “rainblows”.

Like language, time is a crucial element in Ali’s book. So, it’s only apt that the house where Garth locks himself up is at Greenwich, where tourists come to, in a sense, experience time. “I’m standing on time!” says a girl. “I’m standing on not-time!” adds her friend while jumping backwards from the meridian.

There but for the is about time and timelessness. About presence and absence. About temporary permanence. About the dead and the ones they haunt. About listening to thoughts. About words and silence. There is a lot happening in this book with an anarchic title.

THERE BUT FOR THE
Ali Smith
Hamish Hamilton
357 pages; £16.99