“Companion Piece“ by Ali Smith - review

 “Companion Piece” by Ali Smith:

Two years after her famous Seasonal Quartet’s concluding volume Summer, recently published Companion Piece feels as a fifth installment of the Quartet, beautiful, light and playful as ever.

In all of the books I’ve read by Ali Smith one thing became soon very clear: She loves wordplay, puns, homonyms and any weird multi-faceted, multi-interpretable story. She revels in etymology. All her books are an intellectual treat. All her books show a remarkable capability for inventive, surprising connections. 

And so, again in this book. It springs from the same source as its predecessor, the Seasonal Quartet. The idea is to write about contemporary events as close as possible and show what effect these events have on the writer. It is an experiment in creating real-time fiction, driven by the News, yet managing to be profoundly thoughtful. In quite a masterly manner Smith captures the horrors of our time and simultaneously mirrors their absurdities. But writing text that is so dependent on contemporary events also means to ensure that the gap between experienced life, writing and publishing would not become too great. Whereas the Seasonal Quartet called for a self-imposed strict structural approach now, that the Quartet is finished, the pressure to satisfyingly conclude it and to make ends meet, is off and a new freedom in storytelling is gained instead. The spirit in this new novel somehow soars even higher, lighter, freer. 

The story itself is typical Smith, too. Again there is a focus on present-day anxieties which the recent lockdown, the isolation and restrictions, brought on and finally led to an uprise of oddball thinking in society. The novel comes in two parts, its structure closely related to Smith’s How to be both. First comes a contemporary section followed by a meandering story-within-a-story, set in medieval times of pestilence, poverty, injustice and famine. In juxtaposing the two times, in creating points of contact between two female artists and two plagues five centuries apart, the two stories always reflect or mirror, always contemplate, counterbalance or enhance each other and so make us aware that the problems we think of as being distinctly contemporary, like gender identity, work equality, isolationist restrictions towards aliens, are rooted deeply in our history. Like in most of her novels plot is often secondary to perspective and the accumulation of emotional, social and cultural layers. 

And this layering is exactly what the first-person narrator, Sandy Gray, a single queer painter in her mid-50s, does. In her art she layers words, poems, meaning, emotions and colours on canvas. In the Seasonal Quartet Smith used several actual women artists as means to highlight a tune or serve as a mood indicator. Here in Companion Piece, the heroine/ narrator herself is creating art which is her life’s companion and provides what other human companionship couldn’t give. 

Sandy lives alone in her rented home and temporarily takes care of her father’s dog. Her father had to be hospitalized after a heart-attack and she is barred from seeing him because of the pandemic. Sandy’s mother left them when Sandy was a girl and he and Sandy only have each other as family and are, despite many great differences, devoted to each other. O-tone father: “All that learning, and all you’ve done with it is make a life’s work of for Christ sake painting words on top of one another so nobody can even read them.”  

One day she receives a phone-call from a person, Martina, she once not-really-knew and not-really-liked at college, in fact they only shared one conversation about a poem by e. e. cummings. Then the story unfolds and meanders in typical Smith ways. Martina tells a strange story that happened to her. While working in curatorial function for the National Museum she was detained at border control on her return from abroad with the Boothby Lock, a finely wrought, intricate piece of 16th century English lock and key in her baggage. Assuming it was a weapon, they kept her in isolation for seven and a half hours where Martina then began to hear a voice stating: “Curlew or curfew,” then: “You choose.”

The story proves to be transformative, not only for Martina and Sandy, but also for the children of Martina, young adult twins, super woke, non-binary, awfully narcissistic and neurotically egotistical. Their research leads them to the house of Sandy whom they accuse for being the sole culprit for their mother's sudden and inexplicable transformation. Miscommunications and delightful funny verbal sparring escalate and they enter and take over Sandy’s home, forcing her to seek refuge in her father’s presently empty house to avoid their constant jabbering, presumptuous, annoying, acronymic text-speak. All these disruptions from routine, typical Smith again, bring on transformation and Sandy is forced to open up.

Smith often invites us to follow her alongside a stream of consciousness, meandering, yet consistent and philosophically tinted. She playfully leaps from investigations of words or ideas to cultural references in poems or songs. Jumping from etymology to history to literature and then turning back to daily life and thus showing that all this is material of and for the big painting of life, that is Smith’s great achievement. 

Alongside the tale and in between we are given a short history lesson in blacksmiths or the bubonic plague, a digression in the manifold meanings of the word “hello”, we hear about the curlew bird, we are made aware of the resemblance of its beak in medieval masks, worn as a shield against the Black Death, we learn how the ancient Egyptian symbol for a bird over time transformed into the mathematical sign for greater than and we follow the story of a gifted 14th century blacksmith who was branded and expelled by the community for attempting to work in the trade as a girl. This girl, together with its curlew bird companion, not only makes an appearance in her own time but, miraculously, pops up in Sandy's home who takes her for a homeless, slightly deranged person. 

By exploring binaries and their often blurred boundaries in chapters titled imagination versus reality, surface versus depth, real versus fake and stories versus lies, Smith makes us aware that indetermination could possibly be experienced as a joyful embrace of opposites. She also makes us aware that every person, creature or thing has the capability to become a companion. Smith’s concerns with grief, cruelty, language and art weave through this novel again with wit, warmth and feeling and she has created yet another book, as enigmatic, complex  and intellectually rewarding as her former ones. It shares the best qualities found in the Quartet and is a suitable companion piece to it.

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