I’m not one to jump on bandwagons but, in the case of Ali Smith, I’m willing to make an exception and declare myself a fan. In the past few years she has produced some extraordinary work and Companion Piece offers us one more in a growing succession of extraordinary works. Ali Smith distinguishes herself in 3 important ways (I’m sure I could extend the list far beyond 3 but feel compelled to limit my gushing):
Contemporaneity
First is the contemporaneity of her writing. We first noted this with her Seasonal Quartet where the opening novel, Autumn, used Brexit as part of its furniture, while the closing novel, Summer, gave us intimations of Covid-19. Smith is the literary correlate of a frontline journalist, sending her copy off to the news desk while the ink is still wet or, since nobody uses ink anymore, while the electrons are still humming. She sets her writing in as close to present time as it’s possible to get without a time machine. In Companion Piece, the narrator, Sandy Gray, is staying at her father’s house, caring for her father’s dog. The old man has suffered an unspecified cardiac event and, since this has happened in the midst of a global pandemic, he has to be admitted to hospital in lonely circumstances. Public health protocols limit Sandy’s visits to brief awkward exchanges on an iPad.
Contemporaneity appears not only in the novel’s context, but also in the way characters encounter one another. There is a hilarious exchange between Sandy Gray and the Pelf twins who are the children of a barely remembered college acquaintance. One carries a CELINE bag; the other wears a white T-shirt inscribed in Sharpie with the pronouns they/them. One claims to be in IT, more like a social media consultancy or influencer position. The other carries on as if they/them has just logged off a 4CHAN chat site and aspires to the status of card-carrying QAnon conspiracy theorist. Both talk as if they’re texting, with all the stilted butchered sentences that suggests. (I’m surprised Smith doesn’t litter the conversation with emojis.) Even so, as Sandy/Ali observes “grammar’s as bendy as a live green branch on a tree.” Gaslighting is their default mode of social interaction. Sensibly, Sandy Gray doesn’t become defensive when the twins make vague accusations that she has done something to their mother; instead, she responds with good humoured detachment and deescalates the situation.
Synesthetic Approach
Second is what I would describe as Smith’s synesthetic approach. In all her writing, Smith invites us to engage our other senses in a way that transcends and enriches the otherwise austere space of a novel’s white pages. In How to be Both, for example, she has us contemplate a Renaissance fresco. In Autumn, it’s Pop Art with Pauline Boty. In Summer, it’s a modernist sculpture by Barbara Hepworth. In Companion Piece, Smith engages our tactile and aural senses with something altogether different.
The novel opens with a phone call from Martina Inglis, a vague acquaintance from college days and mother of the Pelf twins mentioned above. Martina Inglis explains that she is now an assistant curator at a museum which has acquired an enigmatic artifact known as the Boothby Lock. It’s an extraordinary work of metallurgy which should not have been possible to manufacture in its time. While transporting the lock back to Britain, border security detains her for more than 7 hours, confining her to a bare room with her precious lock. (By now, Ali Smith fans should recognize her abiding disdain for isolationism, militarized border controls, and attendant nationalistic jingoism.) During Martina’s confinement, something puzzling happens and, remembering that Sandy Gray was something of a master exegete when it came to decoding undergraduate poems, she wonders if, all these years later, her old acquaintance still has the gift. You see, while she was waiting for her release, she heard voices. Maybe from an adjacent room? Maybe through the air ducts? Maybe from the lock itself? Whatever the source, she could distinguish only two words and a command: Curlew. Curfew. You choose. As in her undergraduate course, Sandy performs exegetical somersaults, but they don’t necessarily expose anything meaningful. This puzzle provides the impetus for the balance of the novel.
Double Vision
The third distinguishing feature I want to touch on is Ali Smith’s double vision. Her How to be Both provides a clear exemplar. There, she presents two narratives, one in the Renaissance, the other in contemporary time, and offers images like the spiral staircase and the DNA strand to illustrate the way the two stories become intertwined. It illustrates her associative imagination and the way she can discern common threads woven through seemingly disparate cloths. It also accounts for her hostility towards isolationism and strict borders as these throw us into arbitrary categories that try to deny the countless ways we are bound to those who lie, both in space and time, beyond our narrow range.
In Companion Piece, that double vision sets the present day account of Sandy Gray against the story of a young medieval woman who appears in the section titled “Curfew”. Like the fresco painter in How to be Both, the young woman in Companion Piece is an apprentice learning a trade traditionally reserved for young men. She is learning to be a smith (it’s inevitable that we draw a connection to the author of this novel and the creative process by which she forges her words) and we are meant to suppose that she is the clever person who created the Boothby Lock. We met her earlier in the novel when Sandy Gray caught her rummaging in her wardrobe while a long-beaked bird looked on from the bed. Clearly, time is porous where these two narratives intersect.
We learn nothing definitive from either view of the double vision for, as Sandy/Ali tells us: “I’ve always believed there’s real room to move in embracing the indeterminate.” Frustrating, I know, if you’re used to reading mystery novels with a big reveal at the end. What, if anything, can we make of such a story? I’m inclined to turn to another of my favourite Smiths (Zadie) who has forged some useful guidance. In my post on Feel Free, I note how Zadie Smith draws on John Keats and his notion of “negative capability.” It’s a notion difficult to nail down, which is problematic given that it encourages us to resist the temptation to nail things down. Simply put, it invites us to set aside those anxieties that drive us to draw strict boundaries around things and to make quick simplistic determinations. At the same time, it encourages us to feel at ease with ambiguity and the suspension of clean resolutions. It strikes me that, in today’s world, “negative capability” is in short supply. And yet, when the border security guards or the Pelf twins come knocking at the door, this is precisely the skill we most need to nurture. Our sanity depends upon it.
Companion Piece, by Ali Smith, Hamish Hamilton, 2022