Like, Ali Smith’s first and least-known novel is a riddle of enigmas told in two parts that compete and complete with the other: the first, set in ‘the present’ introduces us to Amy Shone, raising soon-to-be eight-year-old Kathleen ‘Kate’ in and around the north of Scotland.
Amy and Kate live a hand-to-mouth existence, moving from one place to the next, for reasons not entirely or immediately made clear. Amy is English, with a posh accent that suggests an upper-class upbringing and despite a well-educated mind, she is unable to read. The how and the why of Amy and Kate’s circumstances are pieced together by clues Smith cautiously lets fall, like breadcrumbs in a forest. One of Smith’s major strengths as a writer is in not spelling it all out for her audience and Like is no exception.
At the beginning of the novel, Amy and Kate have just moved into a caravan on a site where Amy has been employed by owner Angus to answer phones and other odd jobs. Much of the narrative follows young Kate as she settles into her new home and fits in (or out) with her classmates. Kate proves to be an inquisitive, independent child, old beyond her years, yet deeply innocent and intuitive. Like any only child, growing up without material possessions or a solid home, Kate lives very much in her own mind, exploring the beach on her own, ‘acquiring’ toys and books from her school that she keeps hidden from Amy (whom she only refers to as ‘Amy’), or paying occasional visits to a friend’s home to watch television.
Amy and Kate stand out to their neighbors not simply as a small, poor family without a father in sight, but their distinct English accents throw them into sharp relief on a social level. Amy does not discuss her past, where she is from or how she came to be in Scotland to anyone, even herself. Angus, her employer and landlord is clearly smitten with her, in a Brief Encounter fashion. She is described as being slim with dark hair while Kate is fair-haired. On one occasion a stranger remarks how beautiful Kate is, how like a movie star. A comment not without significance we learn much later.
On the exterior, Amy is polite, but distant. She suffers from moments of absent-mindedness or even possibly, suicidal tendencies. The first paragraphs of the story show Amy at a railway station, standing too close to the edge, pulling herself back at the last minute, for Kate’s sake. She remembers trying to abandon Kate several times when she was still a baby. When Kate asks about the circumstances of her birth, Amy tells her a string of fairytales but one rings most strangely: how she just found her at a hospital and decided to take her home. Amy will later reveal that she has no birth certificate for Kate. When Kate asks about her father, Amy dismisses the question as irrelevant: she never knew him, doesn’t know if he is alive or not, so what does it matter? The possibility that Kate may not be Amy’s birth daughter is given strength in these moments, but no real clues come together until the end of the first half.
Amy’s illiteracy is relatively recent in her adult life. She makes odd attempts at reading words in newspapers or one of Kate’s books, but they no longer make sense to her. She seems to live aloof to them, going about her work and caring for Kate without complaint or need for anything better in her life. Like Kate, Amy draws strength from a deeply felt inner life, albeit one that is completely hidden to those around her.
Throughout the first section, Amy’s thoughts conjure images of an absent obsession; what is never said is often repeated. There is a ghost haunting Amy, or the idea of one at least. Her life in Scotland is part of it. Metaphors of fire and burning, the destruction or purification, even preservation they may bring. In the first chapter, an old song is stuck in her head:
Always something there to remind me
always something there to remind me
I was born
to love you
and I will ne
ver be free
you’ll alwasybe apart of me
Amy does not like to dwell on or articulate what has brought her to her current circumstances; Smith’s writing does not allow Amy to live in her past. Instead, Smith, with mystery-laden economy, allows us to guess at the details of Amy’s life through visits to her estranged and successful parents (her mother is a TV chef and her father a retired academic) and a brief, but emotionally charged interview with a reporter researching a What Ever Happened To story about Amy’s old friend and long-missing actress, Aisling McCarthy.
The novel shifts gears in its second half, introducing us to the one and only journal of Aisling (Ash) McCarthy and it is in this half that, while ostensibly to enlighten us about the mysterious actress, we learn more about the equally mysterious Amy. Ash’s journal serves to flesh out Amy’s story and fill in the details of her character and history. Such a conceit does weaken this section somewhat, but Smith’s narrative skills deliver in Ash a character of such rich curiosity and longing that following in her hollow pursuit of the elusive Amy gives their shared story a glowing, delicious substance.
Her journal begins only a few short years after her relationship with Amy ends: now a successful actress of edgy independent films she has made with an eccentric auteur (think Fassbinder, only English), she has gone to visit her father in Scotland, and her writing bounces back and forth between her memories of Amy and her present.
Fiercely intelligent, Scottish and motherless, Ash is raised in an all-male household, including her philandering shop owner father and her two older identical twin brothers. Ash is, perhaps understandably, a bit of a tomboy and, as a precocious teen, already aware of her complicated sexuality. Even before she meets Amy, she has a delicate crush on another student, an American girl who turns out to be less than Ash would wish for. Fate is literally around the corner though as Amy and her parents, on holiday, have just taken up residence in a hotel next door to Ash’s house.
In one of the novel’s most breathtaking moments, Ash, waking from a nap in her backyard, catches her first glimpse of Amy, who has been lying in a tree, watching her for some time. Without a single word of introduction, Amy tells her:
You’ll never guess. I just saw the most beautiful thing. There
was a butterfly drinking from the corner of your eye just a
moment ago. Nymphalis io. They’re quite rare this far north.
My mouth fell open. I looked at her, hanging balanced above me
in the branches of the apple tree. I said, Really? Really and truly?
Promise, she said.
In this one moment, we learn all we will really ever know about Amy: her stunning intelligence, single-mindedness and her almost-unspoken fixation with Ash, that in the first half of the book she gives a brief glimpse of in a story she tells to Kate.
The story is told while Amy and Kate are staying overnight at Amy’s parent’s home and Kate spies a picture of Amy and Ash, taken many years before. Kate wants a story about the picture. Instead, Amy tells her about a girl who went to a river to catch a fish. Casting for the prettiest fish she finds, she catches a beautiful girl instead. Not knowing what to do, the fisher girl is bereft when the other girl just vanishes. She searches high and low but cannot find her. She makes herself a promise to search ‘her whole life, if it took that long, until she found the one she’d caught again.’
When Kate wonders why the fisher girl couldn’t simply cast for another fish, Amy tells her, simply, no, that, like Kate seeking stories, she just wanted the ‘first one.’
We do not know it at the time, but Amy has just revealed something of her feelings for the mercurial and flighty Ash, who, by her own testimony, pursues affair after affair while Amy remains largely unattached throughout the years Ash knows her.
This first meeting, with Amy up a tree (forbidden fruit?), watching the sleeping Ash gives us more clues about their relationship as well: Amy’s ‘superior’ social status as well as her somewhat predatory nature: the very next day Amy, along with her parents, will show up at Ash’s home unexpectedly to take Ash with them on their tour of Scotland – Amy’s idea. Though Ash is stunned, Amy’s resolve wins out and the two spend an enigmatic summer together that, according to Ash’s journal, ends up being more frustrating in its lack of resolve.
Amy closes up at odd, unpredictable moments, and at others proves to be strangely macabre. Upon a visit to a Neolithic burial ground, she tells Ash they are beautiful places and that death is ‘so fascinating.’ For Amy, there is a bit of romance in death, which suits her cerebral nature; she is absorbed by information she has gleaned from all her father’s books and spouts facts from them to Ash during their trip. These facts do not always impress Ash, but they serve a different purpose for her: by giving away what she knows, Amy is trying to tether Ash to her, taking a kind of ownership that is familiar to anyone who understands something of domination and submission. Though Amy could never be described as a dominatrix, her intellect is a kind of whip that she uses to either bring someone closer (like Ash ) or keep them at a distance (everyone else).
One of the more telling moments of this journey occurs when they visit a waterfall and, leaning over the railing to watch, Amy asks Ash a question that sounds more like a dare: one that is worth remembering at the end of the book:
If I dared you to jump, would you jump? She said. Oh sure,
I yelled back, of course I would. She put her hand against my
head to shout through it into my ear. One minute you’d still be
safe here, she shouted against the noise, the next you’d be nothing
but air and movement, the secret of it would flash before your eyes,
you’d know it all. Yeah, but then you’d be dead, I shouted back.
Ash is haunted by this moment at the waterfall and later, cannot sleep. It is one of the first of several references to death that flows through Ash’s journal.
The Scottish episode is a brief but simple primer to the girls’ relationship: though they are never explicitly ‘friends’ during this period, there is a sense of growing attraction, of the push and pull of hormones and the need for companionship. Amy’s quiet intensity draws Ash along in her unspoken desire for ‘the first one,’ yet being on two sides of a social divide, there is little the two actually have in common. Amy is on a quest to prove herself superior to her parents: her talkative, self-involved mother and her taciturn, intellectual father, a man whose library she is in the process of consuming. Knowledge is Amy’s weapon and her ambition is its general: her focus never varies save for her attraction to Ash, an attraction her ambition ultimately betrays.
Ash, on the other hand, while the more open of the two, is directionless. Ash’s scattered thoughts keep referring to death: her dead mother, dead celebrities and, more randomly, air crash victims. She is raised Catholic, but has too many questions her teachers will not answer. She worries about the existence of God. Following Amy’s departure, she finds herself at odds in school thanks to a brief but entirely sexual relationship with another (female) student and even a young teacher. Ash, unlike Amy, has no particular ambition or need to please or proof herself to anyone. Like Amy, she is a solemn reader. There is something of a blank slate about Ash: carefree as she is, Amy has left a mark on her that she cannot quite erase.
Something is coming to Ash, but she isn’t sure what:
The haunting possibilities. I shook my head. Something
was beyond me. I couldn’t see what it was, how to get to it.
Something was slipping past, barely sensed, the vague outline
of it gliding down the stairs and through the shut front door, goodbye…
…something wouldn’t leave me alone, something or somebody
was always at my heels wherever I went, whatever I did, or was
it just ahead of me, mocking my moves before I even made them.
It is after this that Ash receives a letter from Amy, a letter that is not so much a letter as a command, a pull on the invisible tether between the two that sends Ash on a free fall journey to Amy’s university; the letter is a prophecy of sorts, a promise that will not be kept or broken. The letter’s finale emphasizes Amy’s view of Ash as something otherworldly:
My grained Ash,
are you running like sparks through the stubble?
‘Sparks through the stubble’ is taken directly from Solomon 3:1-9:
In the time of their visitation they will shine forth, and will run
like sparks through the stubble.
The passage refers to God’s ‘elite,’ that he watches over, his righteous coterie of saints that Amy has a particular obsession with. Though Amy herself is hardly religious, her rooms at the university, as well as her room in her parent’s home, are decorated with popular images of angels and saints. She has a particular knowledge of them, but there is no indication that she ‘believes’ or not. Ash even writes about Amy’s ascetic eccentricities – such as not eating, since ‘eating is impure’ and how Amy developed problems with not having her period ‘just like the medieval saints.’ Amy carves her life like a figure etched in soap: clean and pure, desiring no blemishes to herself or her record and having wild, unpredictable and unruly Ash in her life dares to upset that balance.
Ash’s beliefs on the other hand, are always in question, but as a child she prayed regularly. Amy even remarks on Ash’s Catholicism, a bit enviously, how fortunate Ash is to know the true value of sin. Amy’s enormous trivia-laden intellect may speak more of the classic university archetype: those so over-educated, they almost know nothing.
Ash, in a moment of anger and rejection, will think as much:
She was ridiculous. She was patronizing and ridiculous.
She was patronizing, and ridiculous, and so clever that she
was stupid.
But Ash is the intelligent observer of Amy’s peculiarities: she witnesses Amy’s academic rise with some amusement and awe that is perpetually tempered by desire and distance.
Finding herself suddenly at Amy’s university, without money or a plan of action, Ash, even in a heightened state of excitement and confusion, maps her way to Amy with determination, finding her almost by chance. Amy responds without surprise, her slight yank on Ash’s tether having successfully drawn her in, yet from the first there is coolness to Amy’s demeanor: she is in her own element here, on the path of out-distancing her mother and father, a story Ash has no part in.
Ash’s journal is a curiosity of confessions: she calls it her ‘liary’ since all diaries lie and even suggests Amy’s journals were never so honest – their evidence being boxed up in her father’s attic. How she came to be in possession of Amy’s personal journals spins into the heart – and heat – of the story as Ash becomes better acquainted with the adult Amy, who, with her growing professional stature, comes to avoid (public) contact with her working class friend.
Her journal is a literal chronicle of her obsession with Amy and the ‘half-life’ of her existence at Amy’s university environment: finding work in a library that Amy frequents, her relationship with Simone, another student who finds Amy a bore and encourages Ash to explore her own talents as well as a study of her relationship with her father and the world she grew up in. Ash never allows herself to be lonely, but, like Amy, her most private thoughts are what define her.
Not long after Ash’s arrival at Amy’s university (Cambridge, likely, Ali Smith also attended), Ash stumbles upon an old, rotted and boarded up theater. She takes Amy to show her and together they wander the stage in the darkness, shouting songs and poems to one another, blind in the dark:
Me standing stage left, her standing stage right, as far apart as
we dared go in the dark, calling at each other in the rich decay
of it, with the dead history in the air.
This is their moment, in front of their only audience, ignoring the world around them, delighting in the unseen, blind to their own possibilities, uncaring. They keep peering through the shadows for one another, assured of the others’ presence, always circling, never quite touching.
What gives Like its real punch though are the questions it poses and leaves the reader to answer; Smith’s respect for her audience is telling: she’s going to let us fill in the blanks and the story is all the better for it. She never explicitly tells us anything – we are left to infer and puzzle and, especially in the second half, wonder how reliable a narrator is the mercurial Ash. Fortunately, Smith keeps the motivations relatively simple. Like can be see as a tale of unrequited love gone wrong, a Revenger’s tragedy, or even to some extent (given the title), a tale of amour l’fou or, possible, a folie e deux.
As a first novel, Like is a rich, calculated conundrum, where we, the reader, are witness to the alienating affects of self-absorption as it consumes Amy and Ash in very similar ways, a literary feat Smith would put to greater use and to greater acclaim with Hotelworld. There is little of the experimental genius of that novel here, yet there is no need: unlike Hotelworld, we are given unprecedented, albeit limited, access into the imaginations of two equally brilliant, vexing and inescapably tragic, intertwined lives.
Ali Smith is the author of Like, Hotelworld, The Accidental and the short story collections, Free Love and Other Stories, The Whole Story and Other Stories and The First Person and Other Stories. Her most recent novel is part of the Canongate Mythology series: Girl Meets Boy, The Myth of Iphis.
