There But For The

Imagine you give a dinner party and a friend of a friend brings a stranger to your house as his guest. He seems pleasant enough. Imagine that this stranger goes upstairs halfway through the dinner party and locks himself in one of your bedrooms and won't come out. Imagine you can't move him for days, weeks, months. If ever. This is what Miles does, in a chichi house in the historic borough of Greenwich, in the year 2009-10, in There but for the.

Who is Miles, then? And what does it mean, exactly, to live with other people? Sharply satirical and sharply compassionate, with an eye to the meanings of the smallest of words and the slightest of resonances, There but for the fuses disparate perspectives in a crucially communal expression of identity and explores our very human attempts to navigate between despair and hope, enormity and intimacy, cliche and grace. Ali Smith's dazzling new novel is a funny, moving book about time, memory, thought, presence, quietness in a noisy time, and the importance of hearing ourselves think.

Reviews by members of our Uncorrected Proof Book Club

Review #1 by Louis Bravos, Box Hill, VIC

Ali Smith - the Booker and Orange prize always-a-bridesmaid, never-a-bride - has been on my list of authors to read for a long time, but like so many authors she is not quite at the top of that list. With so many books to read, I may have perpetually kept her four previous novels and four collections of short stories on that 'shelf' of books I'd buy if there weren't so many other authors I want to read first.

Which is why I signed up for the uncorrected proofs book club. Not just for the chance to read a book before anyone else, but also for the chance to read a book that I might not have picked up otherwise - and I'm glad I did. It's a great book, seemingly written for the Booker prize shortlist (and some authors are just born to write books for Bookers - I do hope she wins one day, perhaps this year?) these are novels that are achingly contemporary, witty and easy to read while still being deep.

The premise is simple, a man half-invited to a dinner party (and one of the highlights of the novel is the dinner party conversation, in turns hilarious and cringeworthy) disappears upstairs and locks himself in the hosts' spare room. The rest of the novel goes on around him, is at times only tenuously related to him - he is the McGuffin, barely heard from after disappearing behind the door upstairs. The simple novel's charm is in its (at times scarcely believable) dialogue, its play with rhyme and pun, particularly the character of the precocious child Brooke. It takes a really good writer to write a precocious, know-it-all child well, and Smith does it with charm. I had a week to read this book and managed it before the end of the second day. If I had time (and perhaps I will return one day, or finally delve into Smith's earlier books) I would have liked to have spent more time on it.

Four stars!

Review #2 by Janelle Moran, East Melbourne, VIC

Having just visited Greenwich myself, I was keenly interested in Ali Smith’s There But For The for its setting amongst the English town’s famous observatories. Smith reproduces the scenes of thronging tourists who flock there each day to straddle the Prime Meridian of the World with great accuracy and humour, but she doesn’t stop there. She turns the very premise of Greenwich – ordered, measured, segmented, serious – on its head in a number of ways, not least of all by introducing an element of chaos in the form of Miles, a stranger at a dinner party who refuses to leave, surreptitiously locking himself in the house-proud family’s spare room for reasons mysterious and seemingly indescribable.

There But For The is a satire on the insatiable appetite of the mass media for ‘news’, the pernicious growth of consumer culture, and the pressure-driven, results-focused nature of academia. It also plays on our fear of strangers, though, by chronicling the story of one who penetrates the most intimate of private spaces – the middle class home. By far the novel’s most interesting premise, for me, is the way Smith deconstructs the elements of time and place for which Greenwich is known, exposing their ultimate artificiality. In There But For The, for example, characters insist on inhabiting spaces they shouldn’t, and whilst they appear obsessively concerned with measuring just how long the stranger has been/will be camped in the house, the reader has no real sense of how time is really passing. Further subverting established concepts of time, whilst this stranger (his name a unit of measurement in itself) regresses into childhood behaviours by locking himself in a room and communicating only through notes passed under the door, another of the novel’s central characters, Brooke, is an almost preternaturally intelligent nine-year-old who wanders around Greenwich when she’s supposed to be at school as if she’s some kind of wise, elderly sprit guide, befriending strangers and perplexing them with her thoughts on language and philosophy.

The please of There But For The is not in the plot (frustratingly little actually happens in the novel) but in the playful, surprising way it is rendered – its puzzles and puns, its absences and inconsistencies. A wonderful, joyful read.

Review #3 by Nick Hays, Southbank, VIC

The crux of the story is seemingly simple – you are hosting a dinner party when a guest of a guest disappears from the table, takes himself upstairs and promptly locks himself in a bedroom, refusing to come out. You wouldn’t really call this man, Miles Garth, a protagonist as such – he is only really seen in the recollections of the other characters or as an arm, outstretched from the window of his room ready for his ‘one o’clock basket’. He is perhaps more of a motif amongst a disparate group of characters, allowing Smith to shift to anyone of these similarly strange individuals. Even his name is up for grabs; those milled around the base of his self-imposed tower would prefer him to me ‘Milo’ because it is slightly more ‘catchier’. As one of the characters explains ‘all those people outside the house and watching YouTube and reading the papers and looking on the net don’t know what the fact about Mr Garth is’ – you could put the reader in this category too.

For me the novel really then comes down to two key interwoven elements – communication and language. The characters in There But For The, including a uncannily gifted child and an indefatigable dead mother (who gets the best introduction– ‘Mark’s mother, Faye, had been dead for forty-seven years, her most recent attention-getting device was rhyme’), communicate (or don’t) in the most curious of ways. The central dinner party conversation that takes place around the beginning of Miles’ self-imprisonment, discussing everything from internet porn to the ethics of air-travel, is so brilliantly disjointed and banal it is perhaps no surprise that he took the short walk up the stairs and the locked the door behind him.

Smith’s novels and short stories are known for their unique use of deceptively simple language and this latest one continues to play with our understanding of it. Towards the beginning of the work is a seemingly straightforward line that could really set the tone for the remainder of the work – ‘this story is true and happened in the future long ago’. On first reading this it seems to make sense – words, rhythm, spacing – but when put together how Smith manages it astounds and bewilders, leaving you trying to navigate something that looks quite normal. But that is the pleasure of Smith’s works that you can truly relish in.

Review #4 by Trudy Smith, North Rocks, NSW

It’s a simple enough idea: a man comes to dinner as the friend of a friend and locks himself in the spare bedroom, refusing to leave. What occurs as a result of this is a far more complicated story wrapped around time (it does occur in Greenwich) and a group of seemingly unconnected strangers (one of the connections gave me goose-bumps).

At its heart, this is a story about connectedness, and the desire to be part of something important. The man in the bedroom is only ever seen as the swish of a curtain, or a hand reaching out through the window for a food basket but this connection is strong enough to promote a cult like following and a whole new life for one of the home owners.

The characters in this story are all delightful, (with the exception of the dinner guests that drove our protagonist into the bedroom in the first place - I kept jumping ahead to see if its cringe-worthiness would ever end), and some of the dialogue is witty and clever (the dead mother gets all the best lines).

Unfortunately, this reads like all (prospective) prize winning books do – the structure of the dialogue kept reminding me that it was important literature and I was ready for it to be over - the final chapter felt endless, there wasn’t a satisfying resolution and I closed the book wondering what the point of it all was. And maybe that’s the point.

Review #5 by Melanie Joosten, (author of Berlin Syndrome) Melbourne,

Words. That’s where the joy is found for Ali Smith, and for her reader. From her choice of contrasting epigraphs to the title that begs to be finished off, Smith cannot resist playfully reminding her reader at every opportunity that this a novel. And what a fine one it is.

So many novels these days tell a story. If we’re lucky it’s the kind of engaging and intriguing one that keeps us turning the pages and surprised by twists and turns. Sometimes the story has been heard before (most have, haven’t they?) but the author presents it to us with fresh insight and offerings of previously unmined depths. All too often, however, this story could have been told in any number of ways – as a film, a tv series, a poem, a painting, a play. But an intelligent reader wants more than a universal story. They want to think (gasp!), and that’s what Smith allows, and encourages as she reminds us what a novel is capable of, and pummels at its boundaries, seeing where they might give.

She is a writer who knows her tools and who delights in language. Its sounds, the way it appears on the page, the way it limits our own thinking about the world. There But For The is a series of interior monologues that riffs as comfortably on the great existential questions as it does on the inherent despair of the modern day dinner party (are they not the same thing?). From the simple premise of a dinner guest who locks himself into the spare room, Smith manages to traverse time, musicals, ageing, bullying and the terrors of the contemporary world. And she does it with such a deft touch it seems effortless – and lets us, the readers, left feeling like a (slightly smug) ‘cleverest’.

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