The Man in the Spare Room

Hamish Hamilton

Pages: 357

Rs 550

Ali Smith’s new novel,There but for the,is built around a presence in absence. The central character,a mysterious,little-known,little-seen,enigmatic man named Miles Garth,performs one pivotal action — of hiding himself from our view — and sets the plot in motion. Except,nothing happens. What’s taken away is not just narrative linearity. Nothing happens where we would expect it to happen. Yet,considerable wordplay and action are set in motion around a central act which never resolves,which creates an absence,where the centre of the novel should be.

If Smith’s Godot never arrives,the novel’s real inheritance,or inspiration,is the absurd situation in Eugène Ionesco’s play Amédée,or How to Get Rid of It. For that matter,There but for the is a tribute to persistent literary,cultural and philosophical leitmotifs. Just how often have we come across the guest who overstays his welcome by design or accident? The answer is — from television comedies,films,Broadway hits,literature — very often. Miles comes to a dinner party in Greenwich,London,reluctantly,at the invitation of a few hours’ acquaintance. Between the main course and dessert,he silently slips upstairs and locks himself in the hosts’ spare room. He never comes out. By removing himself from everybody’s field of vision,Miles comes to occupy the centre of their lives. In setting her characters and their preoccupations in motion around this borrowed leitmotif,Smith unleashes a quest on the nature and meaning of time,memory,history,art,culture,civilisation,death,loss,life and living — with a scintillating satire on contemporary society and a pilgrimage through popular culture.

In Ionesco’s Amédée,a middle-aged couple live for years with a corpse in their bedroom. We never know what the corpse signifies (the wife’s lover,past follies,guilt?),but it keeps growing bigger,in “geometric progression”,and ultimately a foot sticks out into the living room,threatening to drive the couple out. What the corpse is,is less important than what it does,although solving its mystery could provide an answer. Miles Garth,like Kafka’s K,threatens to destroy the hosts’ (Genevieve and Eric Lee) exclusive but fragile world,in his case,by a single act of wilfulness. But what about Miles? Who is he? Is there any “relief… in just stepping through the door of a spare room,a room that wasn’t anything to do with you,and shutting the door,and that being that”? Does he speak to himself? Are words being useful? Has he lost language altogether? Or do words mean more,do they proliferate? “Did he want to know what it felt like to not be in the world? …Was it some wanky kind of middle-class game about how we are all prisoners even though we believe we’re free as a bird…? …Did he inhabit his cell for the good of the others,like a bee or a monk?” These questions occur to Anna Hardie (misnamed by others as Anna K.,driving home the Kafka connection),a once-shy Scottish woman whom Miles had “re-invented” as a teenager,who is now jobless in the recession.

Smith works her novel through characters who barely know Miles,but each of whose lives was changed by an encounter with him. There’s Mark,gay,whose immensely gifted artist mother had committed suicide when he was 11,who brought Miles to the dinner,after a chance conversation towards the end of a performance of The Winter’s Tale had made them acquaintances. Or May Young,old and dying,who lost a daughter aged 16 long ago and kept getting a visit from a boy the girl had known on each anniversary of her death. At the end of May’s section we learn the boy was Miles. And finally,nine-year-old Brooke Bayoude,an intensely verbal,abnormally precocious,coloured child who becomes the keeper of Miles’ time in the Lees’ house,whose parents are academics,with the father possessing an encyclopaedic knowledge of old musicals.

Smith’s brilliance comes out in the satire on the circus around absent Miles that becomes a picture of the absurdity of the times. Mrs Lee will not drive Miles out by breaking down the door because it is “believed to be 18th century”,but she gets a column published in a paper with the title “A stranger is living in our house against our will”,while she ignores Miles’ vegetarianism and slips wafer-thin ham under the door to drive him out. Meanwhile,the circus unfolds at the back of the line of houses,where people assemble to see Miles’ hand come out of the window to pick up the basket on a pulley that is feeding him thanks to good Samaritans and do-gooders. The dinner party itself,the structurally central set-piece,is a highly stylised satire which is the weakest section of the book but a brutal exposure of middle-class snobbery,philistinism and heartlessness.

Ali Smith is also an instinctive wordsmith. This novel is nothing if not a study of language and how it works in life and literature. Brooke and Anna love punning (“There’s no business like slow business”; Brooke is not just the cleverest in class,but the “cleverist”,whose take on the history of the Greenwich observatory is: Observe-a-Tory). In fact,ability at wordplay (and punning) is the moral divide of the book. Brooke,her parents,Anna,Miles,Mark,and even May in her mistakes and prejudices,are on the right side of the divide,to the extent there is a clear one. Anna describes her office (a relocation centre for refugees) as “The Centre for Temporary Permanence”. Temporary permanence is what Miles becomes,who might after all have found a rent-free lodging in the recession.

Ali Smith is one of the most important and talented contemporary writers. Had her novels been written by a male author,even the best like Hotel World and The Accidental,critics would have been kinder and more attentive. There but for the is an unapologetically intellectual tour de force of serious playfulness.