In Slow River, we are presented with a protagonist who is rarely who she says she is, yet always remains herself. Frances Lorien van de Oest is the kidnapped heir to a multi-billion dollar company working as a grunt in a sanitation plant for little pay. Nicola Griffith uses Slow River to present Identity as a two-fold concept, where one is defined by a legal classification, yet also by the set of morals and experiences they carry with them.

The most pressing and recognized identity is of course the legal identity. Present in the form of PIDAs, they are microcapsules implanted into the crook of the thumb and forefinger that are scanned for economic transactions, and detail the owner much in the same way as a license. When Lore gains her new identity, she is given all the details with the PIDA: “Bird, Sal. Female. Caucasian. Blood type A positive. DOB… Twenty-five…The tiny black PIDA was in a sealed bag with… a plaskin pouch the size of a pink cockroach. Frozen blood for DNA tests,” (21). When Lore was still part of the van de Oest family, she had her own PIDA rather than that of a dead woman, and when kidnapped, the first thing to go was this legal identity. By removing her PIDA, her kidnappers create a legal nobody, making it impossible for her to prove her identity on her own or access her family’s resources. Lore becomes a nobody, but at the same time can now be anybody simply by obtaining false temporary PIDAS, giving her a new sense for the world and for what an identity is.

Through her reactions to experiences with Spanner of switching identities through various PIDAs, Lore shows her true inner identity, and comes to realize it is an inescapable, defining part of her. While working as Sal Bird at the Hedon Road Plant, Lore is supposed to know little more than the most basic of procedures and functionings of the facility. Yet when she recognizes issues with the operation, she can’t help but remember things from her van de Oest past. Magyar, her supervisor, tells her that the bacteria in the plant need to always be at 27.3oC, never anywhere else, yet Lore recognizes and almost speaks out to tell her, “For a denitrification-nitrification process, heterotrophic facultative bacteria were usually comfortable anywhere between twenty-five and thirty degrees,” but realizes in time that this is something Sal Bird would have no conception of (47). In addition to the knowledge, though, Lore also retains some of her superiority complexes, as shown when she discovers that her family’s nutrient products have been substituted with generics. While the bacteria are most likely completely capable of surviving and functioning with the nutrients provided by the generic brand, Lore feels that the lives of millions of people are being put at grievous, unnecessary risk. Yet the plant functions fine until an occurrence of deliberate sabotage.

Lore’s experiences through the novel help her to realize that there are two levels to identity. The surface level that most people see is the legal and falsifiable persona, but the deeper, moral identity is something that cannot be recreated and invented so easily, as it is an accumulation of knowledge and experiences. The two together serve to act as the real, present self, and at the end of the novel, Lore recognizes that finally she “would be nobody but the Lore [she] had made,” (343).