Penguin, 2002, 238 p.

I picked this up in a local library as I hadn’t read it. The author was born in Inverness and so counts for the Read Scotland Challenge; but see below.

Hotel World is not so much a novel as six novellas linked by the accidental death of Sara Wilby, a young woman worker in a hotel. She packed herself into the dumb waiter and its cables broke, plunging her to her death. The novellas each have titles relating to a verb tense; past, present historic, future conditional, perfect, future in the past, present. The first is narrated by the dead woman (after the death,) the second from the viewpoint of Else, a woman begging on the streets outside the hotel where the accident took place, the third is Lise’s, one of the hotel’s receptionists, whose mother is composing a poem cycle called ‘Hotel World,’ the fourth tells of the strange evening experienced by Penny, a later female guest, the fifth is an unpunctuated stream of consciousness of Clare, the dead girl’s sister, the paragraphs of which are connected by and – with the single exception of an I – all start with &, the sixth is an overview of what various minor characters observed earlier are doing in the present moment.

As in all of Smith’s novels which I have so far read the text’s right hand margin isn’t justified. This didn’t, though, seem so distracting in this volume.

The only hints of Scottishness here are the use of the word skirl, one mention each of the inscription on the rim of pound coins of the motto “nemo me impune lacessit” which was that of the Scottish monarchy (English pound coins have “Decus et tutamen” there,) of the “run-rig system of farming in Scottish History III,” and a town in the misty cold-bound Highlands. This is more than in subsequent Smith novels, though.

Several times Smith uses the archaic sounding phrase “back and fore,” where “back and forth” is perhaps more heard, we had pigmy instead of pygmy and foetid spelt in the USian manner as fetid.

I’m really not sure what to make of Smith. She can clearly write well, with insights into the human condition, but is it too much to ask for a plot?

Penguin, 2012, 357p.

The set-up for this is deeply weird. A man called Miles Garth has locked himself into the hosts’ spare bedroom during a dinner party. He’s there for weeks, fed under the door with wafer thin ham or from the next door neighbour’s house via a pulley. Eventually he becomes a TV news and internet fad.

The narrative is divided into four main parts each named, in order, with the words of the overall book title.

There. Is from the viewpoint of a woman who knew Garth briefly as a teenager on a foreign trip called in by the houseowner since her number was on Garth’s phone.

But. Is told by Mark, the man who brought Garth along to the dinner party. Mark hears his (dead) mother talking to him in rhyme.

For. Focuses on an old woman in hospital, whom Garth always visited once a year.

The. A ten year old girl fascinated by word play turns out to be the person who finally makes contact with Garth.

As in The Accidental, the right hand margin is not justified. This is irritating every time the book is picked up after an interval as its appearance is unpolished – like a manuscript rather than a proper book. Once into the swing of the narrative again it becomes invisible, though.

Ali Smith has appeared in at least one Best New Scottish Writing anthology. There is very little to mark her as a particularly Scottish writer. Only one thing here gives any hint of Scottishness – the use of the description black-affronted.

Among Smith’s stylistic quirks dialogue is not rendered in the usual quotes and she also makes significant use of parentheses (some of which last for pages on end) to recount incidents from the earlier lives of her characters.

While the writing is fine (Smith can do fine writing) the narrative meanders rather and never really goes anywhere. It’s a bit like a collection of short stories with very loose connections between them. And we never really get to find out why Garth locked himself in someone else’s bedroom.

Penguin, 2007, 306p

Reasonably successful writer Eve Smart, her philandering lecturer husband Michael and their family are renting a house in Norfolk when they are intruded upon by a female stranger called Amber, who proceeds to inveigle her way into their home, befriend Eve’s twelve year old daughter Astrid and seduce her teenage son Magnus.

The novel is split into three sections, The Beginning, The Middle and The End in all of which each family member has a narrative strand. Astrid’s narration is initially irritating as she has a habit of using ie (or even id est) in circumstances which do not warrant it. Thankfully, she – or Smith as the author – grows out of this by The End. Each section is preceded, and hence followed, by a framing narrative in the first person from Amber’s viewpoint. (This does not illumine Amber’s behaviour overmuch.) The unravelling of the Smart family’s life under Amber’s influence is the meat of the book.

There are several infelicities. Not only are a couple of characters unsympathetic but the changes of viewpoint initially jar and for a long time the lack of justification in the text irritated me. The ragged right hand margin was too much of a distraction. By The End, though, the characters (apart from Amber) are more established and these concerns fade.

I noticed that the “cloud” on my Library Thing tags this novel as Scottish Fiction. (According to the book’s blurb Smith was born in Inverness in 1962 but now lives in Cambridge.) Fantastic Fiction also designates her as Scottish. There is nothing identifiably Scottish about The Accidental, though; not its setting, its themes, its dialogue nor its vocabulary. Mind you, the same could be said about Allan Massie’s The Sins of the Father or Andrew Crumey’s Music, In a Foreign Language both of which I read recently. Interestingly enough, Library Thing has those two books tagged as Scottish Literature.