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    Companion Piece: A Novel
    Companion Piece: A Novel
    Companion Piece: A Novel
    Ebook196 pages2 hours

    Companion Piece: A Novel

    By Ali Smith

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    About this ebook

    "A woman receives an unexpected call from a former classmate asking for help deciphering a puzzling interaction, and from there, Smith spins out a broader story about loneliness, refuge and freedom.” —The New York Times Book Review
     
    “Lyrical and timely…Smith’s novel will push readers to consider what it means to let people into your life, even when you don’t want to.” —TIME
     
    A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.
     
    A day spent locked in a room by border officials without any explanation as to why. A riddle that seemingly has no answer: curlew or curfew, you choose. A phone call from a college friend who hasn't been in touch in years.  And all of it is somehow inextricably linked to the life of a young blacksmith hounded from her trade and branded a vagrant nearly 500 years ago.

    Award-winning author Ali Smith shines a guiding light through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel that intertwines our atomized present and the uncannily parallel era of the Black Plague. In the hope that our medieval past may unlock the answers we seek to understand our hazy future, Companion Piece is a kaleidoscope of human history and experience, and a stunning addition to Smith's gorgeous canon.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherKnopf Doubleday Publishing Group
    Release dateMay 3, 2022
    ISBN9780593316382
    Author

    Ali Smith

    Ali Smith is an award-winning novelist and short story writer. Her novels include The Accidental, There but for the and, most recently, How to Be Both, winner of the 2014 Costa Novel Award. She was born in Scotland and now lives in Cambridge.

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    Reviews for Companion Piece

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Beautifully written, mixing medieval past with the present in a strangely cohesive way.
    • 4/5
      Ali Smith writes so fluidly and with such verve that perhaps it’s natural for her to take on the immediacy of her situation in her writing. Not that she doesn’t tie the present to the past or even the distant past. Here, Covid restrictions link to abstruse border controls and other, more ancient, forms of control. And while there are markers of belonging in the present, there are also even more insidious markings of dis-belonging in the past. And also, not surprisingly, there are stories within stories.

      Smith’s writing can feel utterly up to the minute as well being a bit timeless. It is always a pleasure to read her and an equal pleasure to recommend her to others.

      Recommended.
    • 4/5
      This is a delightfully bizarre book about a woman whose father is in the hospital with covid, and she is trying to cope with his hospitalization and continue her work as a painter, but people keep intruding on her life: an old grad school acquaintance calls her to relate a strange story, and then that woman's children show up at her door to accuse her of taking their mother away from them. While coping with all of this, this narrator thinks back to memories of growing up with her father and absentee mother, and this eventually leads to a story of a blacksmith girl in medieval England. The book is very strange and unstructured, yet there is a delightful thread of wordplay throughout that ties it all together in surprising ways. It manages to capture the strange sense of existing outside of the constraints of time and logic that happened during the worst of the covid pandemic.
    • 4/5
      Wow. Love her writing, even though I often can’t figure out the overall flow of the book. Her wordplay is wonderful, sort of puns I guess but very thoughtful and thought-provoking. She really doesn’t like rich and powerful people, it gets a bit venomous sometimes, but she seems to love everyone else, or at least find them amusing.
    • 4/5
      Sandy is an artist whose paintings are based on poetry. Her father has had a heart attack and is hospitalized during the Covid pandemic. She gets a call from Martina, an acquaintance from college, who tells her of a strange experience involving an overheard phrase. She asks for Sandy’s help in deciphering the words.

      There are three primary storylines – one set in present-day England concerning Sandy’s family, another about Martina and her young adult daughters, and a third of a female blacksmith during the plague years. These three stories come together through common themes: art, socio-political commentary, and isolation.

      Do not read this book for the plot. Read it for Smith’s playful writing style, and for the mental puzzle at the heart of the story. It can get a little convoluted at times, but I enjoyed looking for linkages among stories. It is atmospheric and communicates its messages with subtlety. Very few authors could pull off this bizarre mix of topics and create any sort of cohesive work. Smith’s writing continues to impress me.
    • 5/5
      I just gobbled this one up. It’s super cerebral and full of puzzles and threads to tease out—the kind of book you can think about for a while after finishing. The plot is minimal: a 50-60ish painter who lives alone is contacted by an old grad school acquaintance, Martina, about an experience she had while in a stressful situation, hearing voices that said “Curfew or Curlew. You choose.” Martina remembers the narrator, aptly named Sandy Gray, as being a clever interpreter—in grad school, of an e.e. cummings poem—and thinks she can help. The narrative then spirals out of linear form—there’s an intersecting story line of a 16th-century Black Death–era young woman metalworker; Sandy’s father, whose hospital stay for a heart attack is complicated by Covid restrictions; and Martina’s two very weird 20-something daughters, who muscle their way into Sandy’s house and life.

      It’s surreal and yet makes sense if you read carefully. As the middle of the three chapters makes clear, everything in the book is some kind of binary (there is a nonbinary character, one of twins—a bit of wordplay in itself): there are the plague/Covid eras, the aforementioned twins, and the contrast of artistry/craftsmanship vs. the superficiality of Gen-Z mores and speech. If this is Smith’s Covid-era “kids-these-days” indulgence it’s a fun one, though I found the craziness of the two daughters a bit more heavy-handed than the rest of her storyline. To balance that out is a surprisingly sweet and very apropos through line of kindness, how being decent to people and forging connection is problematic, yes, but also necessary, and that being kind to animals is an unambiguous good and will always serve you well in life.
    • 5/5
      I loved this new novel by Ali Smith. Sometimes her writing is a bit too experimental for me to connect with, but this one hit just the right balance. Set in 2021 in England, the pandemic is still a concern for our narrator, but a lot of the world has moved on. Sandy's father is in the hospital recovering, hopefully, from a heart attack, and Sandy gets a strange call from a woman she briefly knew in college. The woman, Martina, relates an odd experience she had recently which sets the novel off in two different directions: one the current day family drama of this friend and her young adult daughters, and two the story of a young girl blacksmith during the Plague years in the Middle Ages. All this is based around a sentence Martina heard - "curlew or curfew - you choose" - and couldn't understand. Sandy was always known for being quirky and understanding words and poetry in college, so Martina seeks her out for an explanation.

      Somehow, this totally works. Running through the whole book is a love of words and poetry that matters more than the actual plot. It's a book I devoured and now really want to reread sometime soon to savor.

      It's odd, I can't say I really understood the point of all of it, and it won't be for everyone, but it really worked for me.
    • 5/5
      Parts of this book were very confusing and I may need to read it again to understand how the different parts fit together. Despite that, I really liked it in the end.
    • 5/5
      I can't say how much I loved this book, and I want to read it again before too long. The main character, an artist names Sandy whose paintings are based on poems (they actually include the words of the poems underneath the paint), receives an unexpected call from a former classmate that she barely remembers. What Martina remembers about Sandy is that she was always good at analyzing poetry and stories, and Martina has a story for her. Martina works for a museum and was stopped by security while transporting a medieval lock. While waiting seven hours for her release, she heard a voice that asked "Curfew or curlew?" This is the riddle that she hopes Sandy can solve for her. Martina becomes obsessed with the story that Sandy tells her--so obsessed that she ignores her family, and her twins invade Sandy's home, bent on discovering what has happened to their mother. The UK is in the midst of COVID, just released from lockdown and other restrictions, and Sandy is still being extremely careful because her father is in the hospital after suffering a heart attack. But the Pelf twins seem to believe that they are invincible and that COVID is completely gone.

      Strange things keep happening, although Sandy seems to take it all pretty much in stride. At one point, she comes home to find a disheveled, battered girl with an odd manner of speaking and an odd-looking bird companion ransacking her closet, looking for a pair of shoes. She becomes the link between Martina's story and Sandy's own.

      This is a book for readers who love words, not just plots. Smith loves to play with words, and it takes a bit of concentration to play along, but it's definitely worth the effort. The novel is like a puzzle, and it's a joy to work it out. Along the way, we're given keen insights into art, artists and artisans; politics and society; loneliness v. solitude; and much, much more. Can't wait to pick it up and read it again, but I need to let it settle for a bit first.
    • 4/5
      The trouble with using a title like "Seasonal Quartet" is that you pretty much have to stop after the fourth book, even if it's working astonishingly well (unless you're Douglas Adams). But of course there's nothing to stop you writing a kind of appendix that isn't actually named after a season of the year...

      This isn't part of the Seasonal Quartet, then, and the characters and action don't overlap, but it's unmistakably using the same techniques and exploring the same kind of ideas about all those hideous things in present day life we spend most of our time pretending not to see. And about the power of stories and the arts to fight back, even if only quixotically.

      Taking her cue from an e.e. cummings poem, Smith uses a kind of two-steps-backward-one-step-forward narrative sequence, which is disorienting at first but very effective, and she also sets up an unexpected crossover between Tudor and Lockdown England, bringing out parallels in the authoritarianism, intolerance and oppression of the poor going on in both periods — something like what she did in How to be both. The artist and poet Sand is isolating herself at home whilst her elderly father is in hospital not-with-the-virus, but she reckons without the prime pest of her student days, Martina Pelf née Inglis, who rings her up out of the blue with an odd question about curlews and curfews. And then she finds a female blacksmith with a curlew on her shoulder trying on her shoes, and things start getting quite confusing.

      As usual, wonderful, clever, witty writing, making us question things that always seemed quite normal and reasonable, and suggesting wonderful subversive possibilities in the world around us, awful though it is at the moment.
    • 5/5
      She stepped into the woods and in thirty seconds was lost. It would be dusk soon. The trees creaked in the wind, birds fluttered in the new greening leaves. “What I sensed, clear as unruined air, was the ghost of a chance, a different presence.”

      It is 2021 and Sandy’s father is hospitalized with a heart problem. Covid restrictions are in place and she is social isolating, unable to be with her father. Life has been reduced to an endless suspension, a freezing of spirit. She takes a walk she often enjoyed with her father. Then, stepped off the path.

      I remember those days, spring of 2021, when we took wide arcs around people we encountered. When I walked to the park and avoided the children playing there. We stayed at home, masked to greet the delivery people at the door.

      Like millions of people, Sandy experienced life as a kind of limbo, a stasis, as if lost in a forest where one sits and waits to be found.

      An unexpected phone call from a woman who was less than an acquaintance in college engenders a series of strange events. The woman has a story to tell, hoping that Sandy can dissect its meaning the way she dissected a poem in college.

      Isn’t that what we all want? To understand this strange, disorienting world? Hoping that a writer or artist or musician or therapist or doctor can name what ails us, connect the dots for us?

      People force their way into Sandy’s house, bringing threat of infection while asking for her help, burglars and teenagers escaping the closed circuit of home. Laura can’t take the infection to her father and tries to send them away.

      Meanwhile in the past, a young woman smithy, a plague survivor, now an illegal vagrant, endeavors to find a safe haven in the world. She perhaps will create a marvelous clock that will outlast her.

      Companion Piece is a story to reread, each reading a richer experience, Ali Smith touches on so many things. She leaves us with Sandy walking her father’s dog across a common where plague victims were buried hundreds of years ago, observing nature. She meets a woman who recognizes the dog, asks about her father, and sends her ‘hello’ to him. It is an ending that envelopes with warmth. Perhaps a simple greeting between two people is enough. We are lost in the woods, but we are in it together.

      I received a free book from the publisher. My review is fair and unbiased.
    • 5/5
      Storytelling. Jump straight in, the variation is familiar, anonymous officialdom and borders, wordplay and playfulness, changing time frames, accidentals and historical tales.
      That was life. Everything suspect. Nothing uncorrupt.
      Fun and engaging, as ever.

    Book preview

    Companion Piece - Ali Smith

    You choose

    ’Ello ’ello ’ello. Wot’s all this then?

    That’s the voice of Cerberus, the savage mythical three-headed dog (one ‘ello per head). In ancient myth he guards the dead at the gates of the Underworld to make sure none of them can leave. He’s got very sharp teeth, he has the heads of snakes rising off his back like hackles and he’s talking in English music-hall comedy language to what appears to be a good old British bobby, which is an old-fashioned word for a British policeman.

    This British policeman, though, is from right now, he’s the latest corrupt upgrade, and he’s crossed the river Styx and come to the entrance of the Underworld to show each of Cerberus’s heads some fun photos of himself and other uniforms doing fun things like making V signs over and adding fun racist / sexist commentary to the pictures of the bodies of real murdered people which he’s circulated on the fun police app he and his pals are using these days, in this land of union-jack-the-lads in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty one, in which this story, which starts with me staring at nothing in my front room on the sofa one evening imagining a meeting between some terrifying aspects of imagination and reality, takes place.

    Cerberus doesn’t even raise an eyebrow (and he could, if he wants, raise six at once). Seen it all before. Let the bodies pile high, more the merrier in a country of people in mourning gaslit by the constant pressure to act like it’s not a country of people in mourning.

    Tragedy versus farce.

    Did dogs have eyebrows?

    Yeah, because verisimilitude’s important in myth, Sand.

    I could have, if I’d wanted to know for sure, got off the sofa, crossed the room and had a look at my father’s dog’s head to check.

    But I was past caring whether dogs had eyebrows.

    I didn’t care what season it was.

    I didn’t even care what day of the week.

    Everything was mulch of a mulchness to me right then. I even despised myself for that bit of wordplay, though this was uncharacteristic, since all my life I’d loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick. But right then even words and everything they could and couldn’t do could fuck off and that was that.

    Then my phone lit up on the table. I saw the light of it in the dark of the room.

    I picked it up and stared at it.

    Not the hospital.

    Okay.

    A number I didn’t know.

    It surprises me now that I even answered it. I’ll have thought it’d maybe be someone my father’d worked for or worked with who’d heard what had happened and was phoning to see how he was etc. I still felt a trace of responsibility about such things. So I got my responses ready. Not out of the woods yet. Under observation.

    Hello? I said.

    Sandy?

    Yes, I said.

    It’s me, a woman said.

    Uh, I said none the wiser.

    She told me her name.

    My married name’s Pelf but I was Martina Inglis back then.

    It took a moment. Then I remembered.

    Martina Inglis.

    She was at college the same time as I was, same year, same course. She and I hadn’t been friends, more acquaintances. No, not even acquaintances. Less than acquaintances. I thought maybe she’d heard about my father (though God knows how she would’ve) and even though we hardly knew each other was maybe calling me now (though God knows where she’d’ve got my number) to be, I don’t know, supportive.

    But she didn’t mention my father.

    She didn’t ask how I was or about what I was doing or any of that stuff people generally say or ask.

    I think that’s the reason I didn’t hang up. There was no pretence in her.

    She said she’d wanted to talk to me for some time. She told me she was now assistant to the curator at a national museum (could you ever have imagined I’d end up doing something like that?) and she’d been travelling back from a day-return trip abroad where she’d been sent by the museum in one of the gaps between lockdowns personally to accompany home from a travelling exhibition of late medieval and early renaissance objects an English metal lock and key mechanism, a device, she explained, way ahead of its time and an unusually good and beautiful version, quite important historically.

    So she’d arrived back here in the evening and stood in line at border control for the very long time it took to reach the front of the queue of people whose passports were being checked manually (most of the digital machines weren’t working). Then when she finally reached the front the man behind the screen told her she’d given him the wrong passport.

    She couldn’t think what he meant. How was there such a thing as a wrong passport?

    Ah, wait, she’d said. I know. I’m sorry, I’ve probably just given you the one I didn’t travel out on, wait a minute.

    A passport you didn’t travel out on, the man behind the screen said.

    I’ve got two, she said.

    She fetched her other passport out of her inside jacket pocket.

    Dual citizenship, she said.

    Is one country not enough for you? the man behind the screen said.

    I’m sorry? she said.

    I said, is one country not enough for you? the man said again.

    She looked at his eyes above his mask. They weren’t smiling.

    I think that’s my business, not yours, she said.

    He took the other passport from her, opened it, looked at it, looked at the two passports together, looked at his screen, typed something in, and she realized there were now two masked officials in uniform standing very close to her, just behind her, one on each side.

    If I can just see the ticket on which you travelled here today, the man behind the screen said.

    She got her phone out, scrolled it till she found the ticket, turned it and held it up towards him. One of the officials took the phone out of her hand and passed it through to the man behind the screen. The man put it down on top of her passports. Then he sanitized his hands from a bottle on the desktop.

    If you’d like to step this way please, the other official said.

    Why? she said.

    Routine check, the other said.

    They started to lead her away.

    Your colleague’s still got my phone. He’s still got both my passports, she said.

    Returned to you in due course, the one behind her said.

    They took her through a door and through another door into an anodyne corridor with nothing in it but a scanner. They ran the bag with the small packing crate in it containing the lock and key mechanism, which was all the handluggage she had, through their scanner.

    They asked her what kind of weapon was in the crate.

    Don’t be silly. It’s obviously not a weapon, she said. The broader object is a lock, it was once the lock on a 16th century baronial money chest. The long object next to it isn’t a knife, it’s the lock’s original key. It’s the Boothby Lock. If you knew anything about late medieval and early renaissance English metalwork you’d know it’s a very important historical artefact and a stunning example of workmanship in blacksmithery.

    The official opened the packing case roughly with a knife.

    You can’t take it out! she said.

    He took the wrapped-up lock out and weighed it in his hands.

    Put it back, she said. Put it back right now.

    She said this with such fierceness that the official stopped weighing it from hand to hand and rather stiffly put it back into the packing crate.

    Then the other official demanded she prove she was who she said she was.

    How? she said. You already have both my passports. And my phone.

    So you have no hard copy of any official accreditation for transporting a national historical artefact? the official holding the packing crate said.

    They tried to move her to what they called the interview room. She held on to the side of the scanner’s belt with both hands, made her body as heavy as she could like protesters on the news and refused to go anywhere peaceably until they’d given her back the cracked-open packing crate and let her check that both the Boothby Lock and its key were still in there.

    They shut her and the bag with the packing crate in a small room with nothing in it but a table and two chairs. The table was made of grey plastic and aluminium, same as the chairs. There was no phone on the table. There were no windows. There was no visible camera on any of the walls to which she could wave or signal, though there may well have been cameras she couldn’t see but God knows where, Sand, but people can do anything with a very small lens these days. Lenses are smaller than fruitflies now. Not that there was anything even remotely alive in that room other than me. There was also no inside handle on the door and the door could not be coaxed open by any scrabbling at its sides; there were scratch signs and little gouges at its foot and along its edge from people’s past attempts at this. There was no wastepaper basket, as she discovered after banging on the door produced no one to tell her where a toilet might be or escort her to one, and what happened next was that they left her in there for what turned out to be quite a long time.

    Then they released her without any interview or explanation, gave her back her phone but kept her passports, to be returned to you, a woman at a reception desk on the way out told her, in due course.

    I still haven’t got either of them back, she told me. And I can’t make up my mind. Either they put me in there and honestly forgot about me or they forgot about me on purpose.

    Either way, I said. Quite a story. Seven hours.

    And a half, she said. The whole of a working day, one that started at half four in the morning and was mostly spent standing in border control queues. But seven and a half hours. In a soulless room.

    Long time, I said.

    Very, she said.

    I knew what I was supposed to do next. I was supposed to ask what she’d done in that soulless room for seven and a half hours. But I was at a time in my life where I was past caring, I was way past politeness and social chitchat coercion.

    I held back.

    I was silent for about ten seconds.

    Eh, hello? she said.

    I don’t know how she did it but something in her voice made me feel bad for holding back.

    So. What did you do in there all that time, then? I said.

    Ah. Thereby hangs a tale, she said (and I could hear the relief in her voice that I’d said what I was supposed to say). That’s actually what I’m calling you about. Listen. This weird thing happened. I haven’t told anyone else. Partly because I can’t think who else to tell. I mean, I thought about it, and I kept drawing a blank. And then last week I thought, Sandy Gray. Sand from the past. From when we were at university. That’s who’ll know what to make of this.

    Make of what? I said,

    and started silently to worry, because since everything had changed, and though on the surface of things I’d kept myself going partly by pretending like the rest of us that everything was fine, if awful, in fact so much had shifted that I was pretty sure I wasn’t the person I’d once been.

    At first, she was saying, I sat in there doing nothing, with my hands folded in my lap. I was furious but I argued myself out of my fury. I got myself ready for whatever their interview would be about.

    And then the room got quite cold, so I got up and walked around a bit, it wasn’t very big, the room, I started jogging round it and because it was so small I made myself dizzy doing the jogging and turning, it’s lucky I’m not the claustrophobic type.

    Then I tried to open the door again. But I had nothing to open it with. I actually even thought about unwrapping the Boothby Key and using its edge, it’s got an edge-prong with a little thorny hook on it, I thought I might be able to catch the underside of the door with it and see if I could persuade it. But no way, no way I’d ever be responsible for damage to the Boothby.

    So then I thought, I’ve never really had any time alone with the Boothby, have I, or even had a chance to look at it properly.

    So I got the little crate out of the bag, the crate was split open now anyway, he’d ruined it with his knife. And I lifted both pieces in their swaddling out of the crate and put them on the table, and I unwrapped the lock and put it down still in the cloth in front of me. Ah, Sand, the Boothby Lock, whoever made it had God knows what magic in his hands. Have you ever seen it?

    No, I said.

    Ever heard of it?

    No, I said.

    Google it. You’ll love it. You above all people’ll really get it.

    A person I hardly remembered existed and wouldn’t have if she hadn’t phoned to remind me had kept alive enough of a version of me in her head all these years to think I’d ‘get’ something?

    Not that Google’s anywhere near, she was saying, anything like seeing it in the actual flesh, the actual metal. It’s really beautiful. It’s really cunning too. You could never tell by looking at it

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