In a previous post I said that I might write something about my impressions of Ali Smith’s novels. Since I just finished reading ‘There but for the’ I thought that this was a good opportunity to do so. The other novels of hers which I have read (both a very long time ago) are ‘Like’ and ‘Hotel World’. I liked the first of these a lot and the second less. I no longer have many concrete memories of the contents of these books and I just want to mention one thing which sticks in my mind from ‘Like’. I am telling this story from memory and I did not go back to check the details. In one episode a young girl growing up in Scotland is alone at home when a woman comes to the door. This woman is of the exotic type called ‘English’. The girl asks her if she would like tea, according to the usual code of hospitality in that social context, which is the one I grew up in. The woman asks her what kinds of tea she has. This confuses the girl completely and would have confused me just as much in the same situation. For us drinking tea was very important and tea was tea. We knew nothing about herbal tea, fruit tea, green tea or special kinds of black tea. I only encountered Earl Grey, for example, as a student. In this context I remember one other experience I had while I was at university. I used to spend the summer holidays with my family. In general our dinner at home, the main meal of the day, always included potatoes. These potatoes grew on our farm and I was involved with planting and picking them as well as eating them. (I mentioned in a previous post how this encouraged my interest in metaphysics.) My grandmother, who lived with the family, loved eating potatoes, in particular potato soup, and towards the end of her life she sometimes said that that she would be quite happy to eat nothing else. The specific memory I wanted to mention is a comment she made on the eccentric habits I had picked up at university. She said, in the context of potatoes, ‘O, Alan he eats rice and pasta and ‘yin dirt’ (standard English translation ‘that rubbish’).
Now let me finally come to ‘There but for the’, I enjoyed reading it a lot and it had the effect of a good novel of somehow modifying my feelings and mood in everyday life. Being confronted with and made to think about certain ideas helps with getting out of certain ruts. I have to say that I cannot recommend the book as bedside reading. I found that when I read it before going to bed it had the effect that my thoughts had such a momentum that they could not easily slow down. I would not advise reading it in public either, unless you are a real extrovert. At any rate I could end up laughing so much that it would make me embarrassed to do so in public.
The book is very up to date in the sense that it features a lot of aspects of our daily life which are very new. There are some things which can creep up on us so that they become familiar without our ever really being conscious that they are there. The book helps to reveal these hidden companions. It is full of humour and wordplay, much of which I appreciated. I imagine that I also missed a lot. I have lived outside Britain and even outside English-speaking countries for many years now and this is bound to mean that various jokes and references were lost on me. Many of the things in the book could be taken as comments on society but the interesting thing is that these comments come from inside. We receive them through a portrayal of the thoughts of individual characters including a young girl (who plays a central role) and an old woman approaching death. We also receive them by hearing the conversation between very different characters and seeing the misunderstandings which limit communication between them. In the end, while I appreciated the text ‘locally’ I was left with the feeling that I did not understand its global structure. I could see that the snake bites its tail, the end connecting to the beginning, but I felt as if I was left facing a question mark. Was this the author’s intention? Or did I miss something essential? Whatever the answers to these questions I feel that the time I spent reading the book was time well spent.
Hydrobates 