Companion Piece by Ali Smith: A review

 

This book follows Ali Smith's Quartet series (Autumn, Winter, Spring, Summer) all of which I read, enjoyed, and reviewed here. I enjoyed this one, too, although I find it hard to summarize it or really to explain my enjoyment of it.

It is, at its heart, a play on words - curlew and curfew. The narrator is called Sandy Gray and the time and place is post-Brexit Britain, now ravaged by the pandemic. Her friend Martina Pelf, formerly Martina Inglis, has recently been held for seven and a half hours by border control while she was transporting a centuries-old artifact, the Boothby Lock, for the museum where she works. The border control officer seems especially annoyed by the fact that Martina has dual citizenship. "Is one country not enough for you?" he demands. The novel begins with Martina calling her friend, Sandy, to relay this incident.

The really weird part of the incident was that while Martina was stuck in a room waiting to be released by border control to continue her journey, she heard a mysterious voice saying, "Curlew or curfew, you choose." The statement seems nonsensical on its face. What could it possibly mean?

Days later she continues to ponder the words and to try to find some meaning in them. She feels that she cannot share this with her husband or family. She turns instead to her friend Sandy.

“You were really good at sounding like you knew what a line of poetry meant,” Martina says. “You just knew what things meant.” And Sandy, surprised, and a bit suspicious, does not disappoint. “There’s a choice,” she tells Martina, puzzling it over, immersing herself. “A curlew is a bird, and a curfew is a time of day after which people officially aren’t, by authority, permitted to be out and about.” She goes on, feeling her way in. “And if we think about the proffered choice, curlew or curfew, between nature and an authoritarian shaping of time, which is a human invention. …” Martina stops her, pleased. “You haven’t changed a bit,” she says to Sandy. And Sandy blushes without, she tells us, knowing why.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part is called "You Choose." In it, Sandy confronts a world that is sick not only with Covid but with spreading oppression and injustice. She is an artist but in the malaise of the moment, she begins to question the power of art.

The second part is called "Curlew" and its theme is freedom. It turns out that Martina had disappeared after talking with Sandy, and her children believe the two events are somehow related. They turn up at Sandy's house, a bit like refugees, and although Sandy wants them gone, she can't bear to force them to leave. Her freedom to act has been infringed.

Sandy's father had become ill, apparently with Covid, and had had to be hospitalized. He begins to recover but is still hospitalized and Sandy has taken on the care of his dog, including daily walks. On one of her walks, she meets a girl on a bicycle who recognizes the dog and asks about its owner. This incident is how the book ends.

I admire Ali Smith's command of language and her use of words. It makes reading one of her novels an especially pleasurable experience. And yet, in this instance, I felt that I somehow did not quite "get" the message that the author wanted to deliver. Perhaps if I took the time to read it a second time, it might become clearer. But I have promises to keep and books to read before I sleep. So many books to read before I sleep.

   

Spring by Ali Smith: A review

Third in Ali Smith's remarkable seasonal series of novels comes Spring. All three of the books have been timely, the action in them occurring almost in the time frame in which we read them. The action here is mostly in October 2018. Considering the time it takes to write a book - the drafting, the revision, the editing, and finally the publication - how does she manage to do that?

The books are very much of this political era, the post-Brexit vote in the UK and the post-2016 presidential election in the US, and this book deals cogently and in white-hot passion with the monstrous treatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers.

The opening line of Spring is, "Now what we don't want is facts" and thus Smith sums up very succinctly the governing strategy of the moment. Facts are not really facts but are whatever you can get people to believe. Truth is malleable and waiting to be shaped by the master propagandists. This is the background for the stories she tells us.

She gives us a psychological tale about Richard Lease, a filmmaker. Lease is grieving over the death of his best friend, an older female screenwriter with whom he had collaborated. Thus one of the themes of the series, male appreciation for female artists, continues with this book. But it is not only Lease's appreciation for the work of his (fictional) friend but also he reveres the work of a real artist named Tacita Dean. Moreover, the last gift his now deceased friend gave him was an idea for a film about writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke who spent weeks in the same small Swiss town in 1922 but never met. She also bequeathed her set of Mansfield books to Lease. So, in fact, the work of three female artists is woven into the story.

Smith also interweaves sections of social media renderings, particularly the collective voice of Twitter trolls which are just as hateful, racist, misogynistic, and ignorant as you might expect. These examples of contemporary "culture" are especially disturbing because we know that they actually do occur. Users of Twitter and other such platforms do threaten to rape, murder, and otherwise physically assault anyone - especially any woman - who dares to express opinions at variance with their dogma. These sections give the novel even greater timeliness. Many could have been taken from our president's daily Twitter output.

Smith then shifts again to the story of Brit, a young woman who works in an Immigration Removal Center, which, she helpfully explains to a refugee who had come to Britain sealed in a hauling container, is not a prison, "it's a purpose-built Immigration Removal Center with a prison design." We understand very quickly that Brit has lost any moral sense she might have once possessed.

Brit's life is changed when she meets a 12- or 13-year-old schoolgirl named Florence who showed up at the I.R.C. one day and somehow - magical realism? - managed to shame the director into having the stinking bathrooms cleaned. Those who meet Florence seem to be in thrall to her and willingly do her bidding.

Soon, but not until we have fully experienced the horrors of the Immigration Removal Center, Brit and Florence hit the road and eventually end up, along with Richard Lease, in a Scottish town. Here, the stories of Lease, Brit, and Florence do finally merge. 

Any summary that I give of this novel is bound to be inadequate. It really has to be experienced. It could be a stand-alone but, ideally, I think it should be experienced, along with Autumn and Winter, in the order in which Smith has published them. Although the stories are not tightly connected in any way, they do build on each other. This one could be said to be the most political of the three. It is certainly the angriest and, in many ways, the most despairing and pessimistic. What, I wonder, will Summer bring? 

My rating: 5 of 5 stars 

Winter by Ali Smith: A review

"God was dead." These are the words with which Ali Smith begins the second in her seasonal fiction series, Winter. And not only was God dead; so were a lot of other things that had been taken for granted. This is the Brexit/Trump era and the world has gone wrong. The truth is turned on its head. Winter is no longer winter; it is a shortened lukewarm interlude.

The first book in this series, Autumn, was the first book that I read last year and I loved it. This book is not a sequel in the sense that it uses the same characters as vehicles to tell the story. These are entirely new characters and new relationships to explore, but the time period is still the present in England and people are still as unsettled and anxious. As one of the characters opines:

“The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Which is a grand old fascist trick if ever I saw one, and a very dangerous game to play. And what’s happening in the United States is directly related, and probably financially related.” 

Once again, in one short paragraph, Ali Smith has summed up our predicament succinctly and precisely.

The present book has four main characters: Sophia Cleves, an elderly and unhappy but wealthy woman; her son, Art, a rather woebegone n'er-do-well who blogs about Nature without having actually experienced it; a 21-year-old Croatian girl named Lux who Art hires to pretend to be his girlfriend Charlotte (who had just dumped him) and visit his mother's home with him at Christmas; and, finally, Sophia's estranged older sister, Iris, who has been a rabble-rouser all her life and still mans the barricades in old age.  

These four gather at Sophia's house around Christmas-time in the year following the Brexit vote. The atmosphere of this book is somewhat more overtly political than Autumn as Sophia, who gets her opinions from the right-wing media outlets, clashes with her left-wing sister. But the books do share some elements. They both jump back and forth in time in the exposition of the characters' personalities. Both of them feature sympathetic relationships between old and young characters - here, Lux and Sophia and Iris. Lux is able to build bridges between the two warring sisters.

Also, both books consider the work of a lesser-known female English artist. In Autumn, it was painter Pauline Boty and in Winter, it is artist and sculptor Barbara Hepworth. And each book features a kind of dreamy reality of at least one character along with acute observations of the world as it actually exists.

“You can’t expect to live in the world like the world’s your private myth.” 

But, of course, some people do. 

Even so:

“You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people think you are by looking at you from the outside.” 

Even though the action in Winter takes place in that season, it would be wrong to think of the book as relating to climatological seasons. Instead, they are more about seasons of the human spirit. Smith's Spring is out already and I look forward to experiencing that season soon.

My rating: 4 of 5 stars  

Autumn by Ali Smith: A review

I finished this book a couple of days ago but just couldn't immediately think what to say about it in a review. I wasn't even sure how I felt about it. It really was unlike anything I had ever read before. 

After giving it much thought - and there truly is a lot to think about here - I came to the conclusion that the book is brilliant. The more I thought about it the more I liked it. In that, I found myself in agreement with the Man Booker Prize committee which shortlisted the book for 2017.

Autumn is the first in a planned series of four books named after the seasons, but you would be wrong to think of the books as related to Earth's seasons. Instead, it would seem that they will be more about the seasons of our lives, what time is and how we experience it. This book explores pop culture and its influence on our lives and how the present is informed by the past. I'm once again reminded of William Faulkner's quote from Requiem for a Nun: "The past is never dead. It is not even past."

The time of this novel is the present in England, post-Brexit election. The main character, Elisabeth (with an s) and her acquaintances are appalled by the implications of the election. Their distress is shown in their Google searches about moving to Scotland or to Ireland, in hopes that those countries that voted to stay in the E.U. will find a way to do so. They are well and truly disgusted by the politics of the times. At one point, there is a soliloquy expressing Elisabeth's thoughts which could speak for many of us.

I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it. I'm tired of how we're encouraging it. I'm tired of the violence that's on its way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet. I'm tired of liars. I'm tired of sanctified liars. I'm tired of how those liars have let this happen. I'm tired of having to wonder whether they did it out of stupidity or did it on purpose. I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to anymore. I'm tired of being made to feel this fearful.

Exactly.

The other main character in Autumn is Daniel. In the present, he is one hundred and one years old and is in a care home where he is thought to be near death. He is either in a coma or asleep - it isn't entirely clear which.

Twenty years earlier, Elisabeth and her mother had moved in next door to Daniel. Elisabeth was a little girl at the time, but she struck up a friendship with Daniel. They spent hours together, walking around the neighborhood or just sitting and talking. Daniel introduced the child to Pop Art and to the work of the artist Pauline Boty. Their conversations about art were to have a long-term influence on Elisabeth, who later studied the history of art in college and wrote her dissertation on the work of Boty.  

Although Elisabeth lost track of Daniel in the intervening years, he was always a part of her unconscious. At one point her boyfriend asked her who this Daniel was that she always talked to in her sleep. 

When she learned that Daniel was in the care home, Elisabeth started visiting him there, and even though he was in a coma/asleep she would read to him. It seemed the thing to do, because back when their friendship was new, he would always greet her with the question, "What are you reading?"

Always be reading something, he said. Even when we're not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

This is a book that defies summing up. Just let me say that after giving it some thought, my considered opinion is that it is an extraordinarily inventive celebration of language and friendship and life and that I look forward to Ali Smith's next "season."

My rating: 5 of 5 stars