Catalytic Ghosts

In any story by the Scottish writer Ali Smith, you are likely to find a precocious young person who delivers a dose of naked truth, exposing the shams of contemporary mores and politics. You may also find a ghost. These figures often serve as catalysts. They shake other characters awake and chivy them along toward whatever small changes or revelations are possible within the scope of the story. They can be main characters, like the young narrator of Smith’s recent novel Gliff (2024), but more often they turn up unexpectedly, introducing a little wobble in the ongoing narrative, a shade of doubt.Smith’s ghosts can be driven by the needs of their new, changed condition, as in her second novel, Hotel World (2001), or as transient and unassuming as the floating head of a Victorian child that visits an isolated woman in Winter (2017), a Dickensian touch for a Christmas novel. A ghost may resemble the human it once was, but not wholly. The afterlife strips something from us.When a dead lover returns in Artful (2012), Smith’s collection of her four semifictional Weidenfeld lectures, she can barely speak or think. She is covered in debris, as if she’d been dropped through the walls of an o...