Companion Piece by Ali Smith
Posted in Other fiction, Reading Reviewed at 12:00 on 3 September 2023
Hamish Hamilton, 2022, 235 p
As its title suggests this is a novel related to Smith’s Seasons quartet, conceived to be written in more or less real time and published as soon as possible thereafter to help capture the zeitgeist. In it Smith once more examines the state of Britain.
Under lockdown, with her father in hospital (non-Covid related,) our first narrator, Sandy Gray, (at University nicknamed Shifting Sand since she dated both sexes) receives a phone call from Martina, a bare acquaintance of that time who has recently had a run in with the UK immigration authorities after proferring them her other passport – the entirely legal one she is entitled to under dual nationality – and then being detained incommunicado for half a day. Martina thinks Sand will be able to help her since she always had a way with things. Later, having found Sand’s number on Martina’s mobile phone her daughters crash into Sand’s life demanding to know why she has persuaded Martina to leave her home. (Which of course she hasn’t.)
Sand’s thoughts tend to what might now be regarded as left-wing but which were once unexceptional. She bemoans government spokespeople “telling me …. how this country was number one … how the thousand or so people dying in this country every week was something we just had to chum along with now and how generous our government was being to everybody in the country by paying out so much public money to government friends and donors” that “Black people were terrorists for organizing themselves into a protest movement that demanded equality and an end to racism,” how “environmental protesters were terrorists for organizing themselves into a movement that demanded we attend to the ruination of the planet” how laws would be passed to make these protests illegal, to stop anyone who asked for refuge in this country from getting here or getting help and to stop travelling people from living their traditional way of life. Not to mention rivers being entirely legally filled with sewage, how women were to flag down a bus if stopped by a policeman whom they thought might be dodgy. And so on.
Another strand of the book relates the experiences of a female blacksmith from back in time who manufactured the exquisite lock Martina was (again legally) bringing into the country. It’s odd how this aspect of the book chimed with Naomi Mitchison’s Sarah Werden, another woman from history who took up a traditionally male occupation.
Companion Piece is exactly what its title says, a novel that stands alongside the Seasons quartet. There is in fact any number of comparable stories Smith could tell about the condition of the UK and fit them into this over-arching schema. The trouble with such an endeavour is that at any time events could surpass the novelist’s imagination. Indeed, how is she to keep up?
Pedant’s corner:- inside of (no ‘of’, just ‘inside’.) “The warrior is called Pyrrhus, as in Pyrrhic victory” (Smith is describing the Pyrrhus in the so-called Trojan Horse. The one who won the victory at huge cost was a different Pyrrhus.)