Han Smith’s debut novel sets the reader down in an icebound town “in the middle of nowhere”. This cursed place of gas plants, hazardous apartment blocks and decaying civic architecture is not named as but bears significant resemblances to post-Soviet Russia. It is here that a teenage girl, “the almost daughter” – a moniker that seems to hint at her mercurial identity within the family unit – lives with her mother, father and brother.
At first, the almost daughter’s life is ordinary enough. In the evenings she listens to her brother watching porn on his laptop through the thin walls of the family’s apartment, or to her mother practising her English on video calls with a woman in Bristol. But soon a “strange time” begins, with the unexplained installation of a portrait of the “taut-polished” president in the lift of the apartment block where the family live. This portrait – which turns out to be a hidden-camera prank, recording the public’s reactions – provokes discomfort, defacement and outright hostility from the building’s residents. And for the almost daughter, it precipitates the beginnings of a political, and later romantic, awakening.
The appearance of the portrait coincides with the arrival at the almost daughter’s school of a new girl. This is the “wild” Oksana, a troublemaker and social outcast with “purple-black” hair. The two first meet face to face on “the day that happened in spring every year when men were supposed to give mimosas to women, and people sent messages about how women were special, and there was a banner roped in front of the school”. Oksana is waiting to be disciplined by the school’s director for tearing down said banner. “I just pulled their banner down because it’s so hypocritical,” Oksana explains. “And maybe also I just said or maybe shouted, what if you don’t feel you’re that kind of woman? What they say any kind of woman should be? Where’s your special day if you feel like that?”
For the almost daughter, who elsewhere is described as “just a stretched pedal that other people churned with their feet and legs and bland hands”, and whose germinating conflicted identity is mirrored in a prose dense with ambiguity, Oksana’s words strike a chord. Her attraction to Oksana soon draws her into the town’s circle of political dissidents, who are working to build a monument and a museum commemorating the town’s troubling and occluded history.
The story of the almost daughter unfolds alongside that of “the woman with a cave inside her”: an elderly recluse whose connections to the town’s dark past, and the almost daughter herself, are teased out, slowly, across the novel’s 77 “portraits”.
I don’t think that the opaque and allusive style Smith deploys will feel approachable – or particularly enjoyable – to all readers. I like opacity and allusion probably more than most, and still found the lethargic pace of the novel’s early sections frustrating. By its close, however, I’d come to see the viscosity of the prose as essential to the project of a novel so attentive to the obfuscations and deceptions of propaganda. Smith is a linguist, and a writer who clearly pays supreme attention to the dynamics of language: how words filter through the bedrock of culture and capital; how they carry hidden freight and consolidate identity for good or ill. In the revelatory 59th portrait, the almost daughter is anticipating a model casting that her conceited friend Valya has encouraged her to attend. She looks up the English word “casting” to find it “came from words that meant throwing”: “To throw, throw with violence, to fling, and hurl. To throw into a mould, pour into shape, fix into form, to harden. And later paths: to assign a role, to communicate widely, to set a cracked bone. All of it was fixing that could not be uncast, in shapes, and roles and positions and bodies.”
It is also essential that we discover, at the same reluctant pace as the almost daughter, her town’s hidden history of exile settlements, work camps and summary executions, of “hunger, bile and gruel … hands rawed, feet rawed, organs rawed inside”. Smith’s unadorned descriptions of the brutality of forced relocation and labour linger in the mind. Inevitably, the project of remembrance that Oksana and the almost daughter are drawn into meets with violent suppression. But before it comes, one of the things I enjoyed most about it was Smith’s attentiveness to the physical work involved in resistance – the filling of refuse sacks, the hammering and nailing, the cutting and sticking – that is here valourised as a necessary precursor to building solidarity, and eventually, perhaps, a better and more honest world. In one of the novel’s most joyful and beautifully realised scenes, Oksana and the almost daughter paint placards, eat dumplings, and dance into one another’s arms.
For all its turbid darkness, this is a novel full of hopeful glitter – and one I know I will return to.
• Portraits at the Palace of Creativity and Wrecking by Han Smith is published by JM Originals (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.
