Richard has lost someone he loves. Brit works in an asylum centre. Florence is the young immigrant with an almost magical reputation for making people make better choices. Eventually they meet and each finds new perspective on their own lives and the state of modern Britain.
Smith takes cohesion to a whole new level. Again. Form and structure and character and everything is bound together, all part of the same, living, organic story. Every incidental is vital to understanding the page, the chapter and the book in turn. Masterful.
Each chapter flows beautifully to the next. Separate moments, but part of a whole.
There is so much to learn here. A book that deserves to be studied.
Now what we don't want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition. What we want is people in power saying the truth is not the truth. What we want is elected members of parliament saying knife getting heated stuck in her front and twisted things like bring your own noose we want governing members of parliament in the house of commons shouting kill yourself at opposition members of parliament we want powerful people saying they want other powerful people chopped up in bags in my freezer we want muslim women a joke in a newspaper column we want the laugh we want the sound of that laugh behind them everywhere they go. We want the people we call foreign to feel foreign we need to make it clear they can't have rights unless we say so. (Page 3)
Note: Opening line Opening lines in literature
What we want is outerage offence distraction (Page 3)
We need news to be phone sized (Page 4)
Why is he here?
That's the wrong kind of question. It implies there's a story. There's no story. He's had it with story. He is removing himself from story, more specifically from story concerning: Katherine Mansfield, Rainer Maria Rilke, a homeless woman he saw yesterday morning on a pavement outside the British Library, and over and above all of these, the death of his friend. (Page 11)
Scrap all the stuff above about him being a director you've heard of or not.
He's just a man at a station. (Page 12)
Look at him, storying his own absence.
Storying his own dust.
Stop it. He's a man leaning on a pillar in a station. That's all. (Page 14)