Name: Companion Piece
ISBN: 9780241541340

Ali Smith

A celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms... It follows the unique achievement of her Seasonal cycle of novels - Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer - written and published in as close as possible to real time, between 2016 and 2020, absorbing and refracting the times we are living through- the 'state-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us' (New Statesman). 'Ali Smith is lighting us a path out of the nightmarish now' Observer

Companion Piece

Amy Thibodeau

Strange book that made my heart ache a little.

initially, i thought - as a novel about the pandemic, of sorts - 'companion piece' would deal with grief as its primary focus. my fault, i should have known better, given that i very recently completed smith's seasonal quartet.

'companion piece' is about the pandemic and its effects on british society - the simultaneous anger and resignation with which we learned to encounter every single day for the past two and a half years, our alienation of one another, our inability to get along anymore but our absolute for each other regardless. it is, as always, a good reflection of the times we live in (pre-ukraine war, of course; because we now have this to deal with) though there are some elements smith executes better than others.

for example, sandy's - through whose point of view we experience the majority of the novel - growing impatience with the lack of consideration on the part of the family gradually invading her home felt incredibly accurate to our re-acclimatisation to each other after the very first lockdown (and even now); the lack of consideration of the family who were wrapped up in their own issues is just as true to life. the motif of storytelling as lifeline in an upsetting and incomprehensible time was also very strong.

the one bit i cannot make my mind up about is the way the children of her university friend, the twins behaved and spoke. it is obvious that some of their depiction was meant to serve as a caricature; while not unkind, i cannot help but wonder whether it was appropriate given how much their generation (which i assume would be millennials / very early gen z) and identities have been beaten down. but on another hand, i think ali smith has a great aptitude for demonstrating how ridiculous some of the ways we speak to each other online are in real life and how after the start of the pandemic, in particular, many have destroyed the barrier between their online lives and lingo and how they behave and speak in real life.

but either way, i still think it is worth reading the novel for yourself and finding out how you feel about it.