A Son of the Rock

Hamish Hamilton, 2014, 383 p

The conceit of this book is that it contains two stories separated in time by five centuries but which can be read in either order. Two different versions – indistinguishable from either the cover or the publishing details – were printed at the same time but with the story orders reversed one to the other. The stories’ connection is via a mural in the Palazzo Schifanoia, Ferrara, Italy, painted by one Francesco del Cossa about whom little is known. In fact nothing was known about him until a letter from him to his employer was discovered four hundred years after his death which demanded higher payment for his work than others on the project were to receive. In my edition the first story is that of Francesco (though the Italian spelling Francescho is used throughout it; Smith frequently uses Italian-type spellings in this section – azzurite for azurite etc ) told as “his” stream of consciousness at a point in time when “he” may be dead, in purgatorium. The inverted commas are cause (the author unfailingly employs this version of the conjunction) Smith imagines Francesco as a woman. There are internal details of del Cossa’s paintings which argue for this possibility. The first and last few pages of Francesco’s tale are laid out in a typographical manner more akin to experimental poetry than prose. This made the narrative more tricksy and difficult to get into than it need have been but once Francesco’s story had been embarked on and the relationships within it established this barrier disappeared. Another narrative quirk here is the parenthetical interjection of the phrase ‘just saying’ at various points in Francesco’s tale. As is usual in Smith’s books, in How to be Both as a whole, the right hand margin is never justified.

The modern narrative is that of Georgia (Georgie Girl, aka George) whose mother (now dead) had developed an interest in del Cossa’s mural and took George and her brother Henry to see it in Italy. The mural and del Cossa’s work in general become a fascination for George.

Smith’s intentions are perhaps summed up by the passage about “how to tell a story, but tell it more than one way at once, and tell another underneath it up-rising through the skin of it.” Apart from the pseudo-poetry her prose flows extremely easily.

I’ll never know now of course but I doubt whether the connections between the two versions of the book would work as well if read with the modern section first.

Pedant’s corner:- doing the minimum of sinop (??) Back and fore (one of Smith’s perennials, but it seems it’s a North of Scotland usage,) some words in the internal dialogue of George’s narrative lack apostrophes; (its, howre, whenll etc.) “It was called, in French, A Film Like The Others.” (A Film Like The Others is its title in English. In French it’s “Un film comme les autres.”)