“But I prefer the windy days, the days that strip me back, blasted, tossed, who knows where, imagine them, purple-red, silver-pink, natural confetti, thin, fragile, easily crushed and blackened, fading already wherever the air’s taken them across the city, the car parks, the streets, the ragged grass verges, dog-ear and adrift on the surfaces of the puddles, flat to the gutter stones, mixing with the litter, their shards of colour circling in the leaf-grimy corners of yards.”īut it’s not so much the subject matter as the tonal range and subtle arrangements of Smith’s work that are unique and peculiar. I had looked in the cupboard and found it was bare.” In “The Beholder”, the narrator literally trails off – it is a rose bush, shedding petals. The story “Last”, for example, begins at the very end: “I had come to the conclusion. She is good at suggesting the elements of the unknown in the known, and describing the half-lives and afterlives haunting our everyday existence. She manages to say important and profound things by not quite saying important and profound things. Readers will doubtless by now be familiar with the general drift of Smith’s work, which is work of general drift.
What Smith herself has to say about libraries is less clear. (“A library card in your hand is your democracy,” quotes Smith quoting Kay quoting her father.) There’s a poem by Jackie Kay, “Dear Library”, and comments and reminiscences by the novelists Helen Oyeyemi, Kate Atkinson and many more, and they all say good and true things about public libraries. The 12 short stories in the book are interleaved with statements about the importance of public libraries by Smith’s friends and acquaintances, a bit like a bonus disc with a DVD.
With her new collection, Smith now establishes for herself an entirely new role and purpose, as a campaigner for the cause of public libraries. There are novels that read like lessons in art history ( How to Be Both), there are short story collections that read like mini biogs ( The First Person and Other Stories) and there are lectures that are actually stories ( Artful). Winner of more prizes than most of us knew existed – the Saltire, the Encore, the Whitbread, the Goldsmiths, the Costa, the Baileys – and perpetually shortlisted for just about every other, Smith produces books that hover between fiction and non-fiction. S he is now officially a national treasure: Ali Smith FRSL CBE, the establishment experimentalist.
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