At times, certainly with Ash's narrative, Like see Ali Smith as a vicious successor to Jeanette Winterson. Unlike Smith's other novels, Like, which still shares a structural familiarity to Smith's later works, asks the question what would Ali Smith create if she spent more time with the sense of chaos that Like's narrative creates for both the reader and its characters? This is a novel with a more sensual reckoning than that inside The Accidental which is one of oscillation.

Like is successfully volcanic. ( )

3.5*

"Monday the 6th April 1987. Dear Diary. Actually this is not going to be a diary, diary is the wrong word for it. I have been suspicious of diaries anyway, since I stole Amy’s and read them on the roof. Amy, mon âme, my aim, my friend Amy. It was very shocking to read her version of things. No, diaries are stupid. Diaries are all lies. Diaries, they’re so self-indulgent.
But we live in self-indulgent times, after all, and for once I want my own twist of it. And if you write something down, it goes away. I’ve been carrying it around with me now for so long it’s taken on a kind of life of its own, I can feel it breathing against me inside my rib-cage, feeding off me, taking all the goodness out of what I eat, all the calcium out of my teeth. I want rid of it. And what a story it could be. What a beautiful, what a romantic, what a passionate story.
Not a story for here, not for small town Scotland, not then, not ever, never here in the decent, upright, capital of the Highlands, where when I was still at school there was an unholy row in the newspapers and in the council chambers because someone thought that something like the teaching of drama on the school syllabus would be nothing less than the work of the devil. Land of my soul and my formation, the Highlands. Where the Brahan Seer, ancient highland magician of the greatest of powers, once foretold that if there were too many bridges over the River Ness, or if there were too many women in power in the nation, then terrible dire chaos would follow."

Like that. Just like that is how Ali Smith hooks me. Every time.

The only reason why I give this book 3.5* instead of 4* or 4.5* is that this is her first novel and I have been spoiled by having already read some of her later work, which much more structured.

Oh, but what a nice feeling it is to be spoiled by Smith's writing...

Anyway, enough fangirling.

Like is the story of young love, of obsession, of rejection and resentment, and of healing.
The structure of the book - like many of Smith's - is anything but linear, so reading it is like just going with the flow and trusting the stories to be revealed. It's a slow start, granted, where we are introduced to Kate and her mother, Amy. Both are elusive characters. But then they have to be, because they are out of place and it is only in the second part of the book, when Ash is introduced that we get to learn more about the mystery.

Apart from the characters - all of which I loved - what Smith really succeeds at is being a recorder of the time and place that the characters act in. I have no doubt that some of the scenes are autobiographical or witnessed rather than invented, because I certainly felt right there with the characters in the late 1980s/1990s. And yet, I did not feel that the story was dated. Like is a story in its own time but not exclusively of its time.

"I smell of the fire still. On my clothes, on my skin, must be in my hair. Sweet, acrid, I love it. Someone could make a fortune patenting the smell of fire as a perfume or aftershave, potent and nostalgic and sexual for people to spray themselves with in the spring and the autumn, at the hinges of the year. Lancome’s Heat of the Moment. Meltdown by Givenchy. Hell by Chanel." ( )

Ali Smith is a deeply original writer whose books are all full of arresting thoughts, images and wordplay. For me this first novel just shades the rest as a visceral, raw, subversive and humorous rites of passage tale. ( )

I will try not to gush too much during what follows, but it is going to be hard, because Like is an astonishing debut novel and a wonderful read, and Ali Smith is very fast becoming one of my favourite contemporary authors.

The back cover of my edition has only some very vague general information on the novel and tells nothing about plot or characters, and in consequence I had no idea what to expect when I started it, which made for an interesting – and quite different – reading experience. And, in this case at least, a very apt one, too, as Like plays to some degree with reader expectations; so while I usually do not care very much, it turned out quite fortuitous that I went into this novel un-spoiled.

Like basically contains two tales, told by different narrators, narrators who like each other and who in some respects are like each other (while being very different in others) – the novel explores the full range of meanings and implications of this seemingly innocuous word, something I am starting to think of as characteristic for Ali Smith’s fiction - just like her predilection for puns, which already can be found in great variety and abundance in this debut novel. (“Shopping centaur”!) During the first narrator’s tale (taking up roughly the first half of the novel) the reader of course does not yet know about this bipartition, but there are many clues scattered about that hint at mysterious events in the narrator’s past, and a girl she apparently used to be in some way involved with.

That girl then turns out to be narrator of Like's second half. Her tale is mostly retrospective, telling about her past and her relationship with the first narrator. Her looking back takes place in a clearly described present (while she is visiting with her father), however, and I doubt there is a single reader going into Like unprepared who does not expect the novel’s strands to merge in some way, the two narrators to meet again. But of course (“of course” in retrospect, of course) this does not happen, there is no reunion, tearful or otherwise, but instead the lives of the two narrators, after having intersected for a while in the past, continue to move apart. Or maybe a better to but it would be that they move side by side, as Ali Smith weaves a tight net of thematic similarities and shared imagery not just between present and past, but also between the narrators, showing how their separate lives have become suffused with their relationship, even where they are not aware of it.

Also, and again thwarting reader expectations, there are quite a few things left unexplained in this novel; the first part in particular introduces several mysteries that the second emphatically does not resolve in any manner. Although I will have to add here that I might simply have missed some clues - this being the downside of not knowing anything about the novel beforehand: I just did not know what to look out for (which is also the reason why – in most cases – I do not mind spoilers all that much: a spoiled reader is a more attentive reader). I will find out once I get around to re-reading Like which I am quite confident I will eventually do – once I have read all of Ali Smith’s other works, of course.

Like does not read like a first novel at all, neither is it clumsy and awkward, nor is its author over-eager to show off her skills (considerable as they are). This is a very un-ostentatious novel that for all its quietude and unassuming habitus runs a lot of risks and navigates them all, resulting in a novel that is both challenging to the reader’s intellect and deeply moving – there is a strong undertow of emotions pulling at the reader that is all the more powerful for not being obvious but spreading its influence below an apparently still surface. I’ll glady repeat myself and say again that Like is a wonderful novel and Ali Smith a marvellous writer.