Ali Smith - Companion Piece

Ali Smith, Companion Piece (Hamish Hamilton)

The novel is not what it was. Even as long ago as Orlando, it wasn't what it was. Like Julian Barnes's Elizabeth Finch, Companion Piece extends in several directions without having much in the way of traditional plot.

Ali Smith is highly contemporary with her novels written and in print so quickly, as with the Seasonal Quartet, that they are vividly if sometimes grimly very much of our times. The NHS is a heroic, miraculous thing that a pandemic only serves to underline the worth of, and cancel culture, text-speak and,

Like I'm hallucinating a government, I said, running this country so successfully, with such calculated ineptness that we've one of the top death rate tolls per capita in the world.,

not least with the absurd advice to flag down a conveniently passing bus while you're being attacked in the street.

But there might be as many ways of interpreting Companion Piece as Sandy says to Martina Inglis when she helps her with an e.e. cummings poem at university, whose 'luminous and sensually disruptive love poems' are scarred by the knowledge that their author supported McCarthy and the US witch-hunts among other miscreancies. One knows where one stands with Ali Smith and knows she's right.

Perhaps it is all a hallucination derived from language and wordplay, perhaps that's what all literature is. As is advisable with much 'modern art', I'm not going to provide a definitive verdict on what's going on but I'll contemplate it from many and various angles.

The sudden shift from the hospitalized father who is 'touch and go' to the nightmare of barely-acknowledged acquaintance from the past and her menacing daughters are traumas we never know when they might take over our lives. The wealth of incidental detail like 'gypsies' having derived from 'Egyptians' to refer to anyone foreign and the history of the letter 'v' pack an immense amount into a book it took much less than a day to be so absorbed in with its excursion into the possible origins of 'hello', the female blacksmith from deep history and the implicit meditation on injustice all offering much to decipher or, at the very least, ponder. It is risk-taking, both mundane and elemental. It's less easy to explain away than the cummings poem was and thus, if inconclusive also vastly inclusive.

Ali Smith does as much here as she ever does and a bit more. One sits back afterwards and can't help but be moved and impresssed.