We encounter Amber, in Astrid’s opening chapter; Astrid being the twelve year old daughter in the Smart family. Astrid, in a lot of ways is your typical crabby, intelligent questioning pre-teen – bored on holiday and given to filming dawns with her new expensive digital video camera and ruminating on life in the form of stream of conscience word flow, while punctuating damn near every sentence with the grammatical abbreviation, ie. She sees Amber in the living room, lying on the couch and ignores her, thinking that she’s there for one of her parents. It’s not til a bit later that she happens to meet up with her walking along a road near the house and they have a conversation during which, Amber seems to know exactly what’s going on in Astrid’s head.

Magnus, the seventeen-year old son appears to be suffering a psychological breakdown, manifesting itself in reclusive behavior – not leaving his room, bathing or getting dressed. We find out that this is a result of a nasty email prank that Magnus, trying to impress a couple of school chums, played on a female classmate of theirs that resulted in the girl committing suicide. Magnus, taking full responsibility for this does not see any point in continuing on and goes into the bathroom to hang himself, where Amber materializes and catches him in her arms as he lets himself fall.

Michael Smart, or Dr. Michael Smart, rather, is a smug, self-satisfied professor of English Lit, taken with himself and his own cleverness. In a detached literary way, he speaks the dialogue he imagines himself delivering – in a word, a pedant, a construct. He is Eve’s second husband and a stepfather to the two kids. He seems to consist of witty repartee, thoughts of shagging his female students (which happens with some regularity) and given to what, on the surface appears to be deep self-reflection, but is actually philosophy-lite and faux self-deprecation. Of course he has thoughts of himself and Amber but she completely ignores him on this level, cutting through the force-field of confidence with which he surrounds himself.

On to Eve Smart, author, person, wife and mother but not in any particular order, who has a successful career as a writer of fictional accounts of real life people who perished during World War II, and takes up their stories as if they had survived and lived on. These books of hers are very successful commercially and at the summer house, she is working on yet another in the series but finding it hard to get on with – her motivation seems shot. Amber inserts herself into this scene as well, challenging Eve’s assertions regarding her work and confronting her at every turn, over Eve’s own legitimacy.

The reader, at this point, gathers that the mysterious Amber functions as a mirror to the Smart family, but more a catalyst than inert surface, she actively engages with each in a solitary and unique way without seeming to be affected herself. Early on, the reader wonders how she manages to first, enter this house and family and second, to stay on for an indefinite time, involving herself with each one. By this point, one realizes that there is a serious disconnect between these family members – they really don’t talk to each other or particularly know anything about the others’ lives. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Amber first turns up and each family member thinks that she’s there at the behest of one of the others. It’s this, plus the fact that they are upper middle-class English and simply too polite to really question Amber or challenge her being there.

The summer drags on and Amber becomes a semi-permanent guest and unofficial fifth member of the Smart family, as all inadvertently explore their own demons with her. Magnus sees it this way for a moment:

There’s his mother telling Amber things. There’s Amber not listening…something about Amber at the center of it like an axis is what is holding them all together right now in this room, keeping everything going round, stopping everything from exploding into an fragmented nothing that shatters itself out into the furthest reaches of the known universe. Amber is ruthless with Astrid. She is unbelievably rude to Michael. ‘As if I give a monkey’s fuck about what you think about books’. She is bored silly by his mother, makes no attempt to hide it. ‘Uh huh’. So: Astrid is besotted. Michael looks more determined every time. His mother gets keener to dredge up ‘interesting’ things to say. It is like a demonstration of magnetic gravity. It is like watching how the solar system works.

Each one of the Smarts appear to experience personal growth but when Amber’s gone, and they return home at the summer’s end, a surprise waits, forcing each to confront what they were, what they’ve become and where they go from here.

Initially portraying the family members as basically stereotypical, Ali Smith develops them to go beyond the simplistic ‘played for laughs’ wacky characters. During and after Amber, their personal growth is apparent and hits the reader like dozens of little light bulbs going off. Her use of language for its own sake is both funny and poetic, shifting back and forth between ludicrous and poignant -- a wonderful balance. Amber and Astrid out for a walk are at a train station and decide to film the security set-up with Astrid’s camera. They are challenged by a security man there who asks them to stop filming:

‘I’m afraid, I imagine, you’ll need to get written permission from the proprietors of each station for something like that’, the man said to Amber, ignoring Astrid.
‘You’re afraid or you imagine?’ Amber said.
‘What?’ the man said.
He looked bewildered.
‘Afraid or imagine?’ Amber said….
‘Eh?’ the man said, ‘Look,’ he said.
We are looking’, Amber said.
‘Listen’, the man said.
‘Make up your mind’, Amber said.

Using the premise of a broken disconnected family, this book is also about one’s existence and whether or not one can prove he or she ever existed, if that matters. Amber’s character forces each family member to, ‘Make up your mind’. Each one of the Smart family members keeps threatening to slip into nothingness, so tenuous is their grip on their own lives. As for Amber, did she really exist or was she invented by the Smarts? In between each group of four chapters that are told from each family member’s point of view, are small vignettes about a mystery person who is called Alhambra after a movie theatre where she says she was conceived. This is probably Amber – like a djinn or shape-shifter, she lives through the ages, appearing for a time and then gone.

My mother began me one evening in 1968 on a table in the café of the town’s only cinema. One short flight of stairs away, up behind the balding red velvet of the Balcony curtain…..Hello. I am Alhambra, named for the place of my conception. Believe me. Everything is meant. From my mother: grace under pressure, the uses of mystery; how to get what I want. From my father: how to disappear, how not to exist.

© Marc Goldin
Reproduced with permission

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Marc Goldin currently lives in Chicago, with three cats, each one more long-haired than the last. Interests have ranged from medieval monasticism to discontinued stations on the London Underground – literary likes too diverse (some would say schizo) to list here although the last several years have been witness to an intimacy with Scottish and Irish literature. American Southern and Beat era lit also account for some of the ‘missing years’. Music tastes run the gamut from Cuban Danzon to Ska (all three waves but having a specific attachment to the second, two-tone period) to the Tuvan throat singers. Has written book reviews for a now defunct Irish literature site and has several short stories in various stages of development. Mad for black and white photography and aspires to someday have a complete collection of photos documenting every close in the Grassmarket area of Edinburgh. Works in the IT dept. of a French company in the current political climate. In football, supports Chelsea, Hibs, and for the sake of employment security, Marseille.

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© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.