Companion Piece

Description

“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.A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, NPR, Kirkus • A BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH: The New York Times, TIME, Esquire, LitHub, Philadelphia Inquirer

“It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith. No one else, I would argue, captures our ongoing contemporary nightmare in a manner that is both expansively imaginative and the perfect mirror of its abrupt absurdity. . . . A novel both enigmatic and inviting, begging to be read and reread. . . . A clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.” 
—Lauren LeBlanc, Los Angeles Times

“Companion Piece is a novel for people who love language. . . . Coming on the heels of Smith’s seasonal quartet, which somehow kept up with the blitzkrieg of current events, Companion Piece takes place in our pandemic-inflected world, an all-too-familiar territory that Smith characteristically renders wonderfully strange. This she does, in part, by blending Sandy’s 21st-century story with another set in the plague-haunted England of the late Middle Ages.” 
—Ellen Atkins, The Washington Post

“Superb. . . . Martina was held and questioned while transporting the centuries-old Boothby Lock for the museum where she works. “It’s really beautiful,” Martina tells Sandy. “It’s really cunning too. You could never tell by looking at it that it’s even a lock, or that it has any mechanism at all inside it, never mind find how or where the key goes into it to open it.” Which is, of course, a fine description of this novel, itself a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it. . . . [A] remarkable novel.” 
—Mohsin Hamid, The New York Times Book Review

  “In her latest novel, wordsmith nonpareil Ali Smith once again shows herself to be a master of forging inventive connections. Companion Piece helps us see our world in a different light by finding points of contact between two plagues and two female artists, five centuries apart. . . . Ever intent on expanding our understanding of others and the world we share, Smith’s work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful — and never irrelevant. But timely though her work may be, Smith is not one to eschew the long view: History matters to her, and so do artists and artisans from the past — almost as much as words. . . . One of Smith’s great gifts as a writer is verbal playfulness — a joy of lex — even in dark times. . . . Smith, on fire, welds so many elements into this short novel . . . that the result is as intricate as that artisanal lock.”
—Heller McAlpin, NPR

“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

“Smith, whose recent Seasonal Quartet novels took on real-life events like Brexit, the election of Donald Trump and the wildfires in Australia, has now written a pandemic-era story. 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

“Companion Piece [is] a distinct but worthy addition full of jokes, puns, and parables to make sense of the modern pandemic age.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Smith’s sensational twelfth novel, like the eleven before it, defies easy categorization. The chaser to her extraordinary Seasonal Quartet centers on Sandy Gray, here a painter struggling to endure Covid-19 lockdown in England. . . . Like Smith’s other novels, Companion Piece is a formally dazzling story, constructed from a découpage of funny, messy, beautifully disparate elements.”
—Esquire

“Companion Piece is shapely, but not conclusive. It doesn’t feel like a coda to the Four Seasons tetralogy, rather an addition to a book sequence for all seasons, with no end in sight. Smith could carry on adding to the writerly collage she is creating through many more volumes. I hope she does.”
—Lucy Hughes-Hallett, The Guardian
 
“[A] dialogue-driven, deeply imagined, hilarious, and affecting tale of unexpected companionship during a plague . . . Smith follows her award-winning Seasonal Quartet with a bristling yet tender, richly layered, brilliant, and dynamic novel of connections forged and love affirmed.”
—Donna Seaman, Booklist (starred review)
 
“Linguistic fireworks? Check. Ingenious structure? Check. Moral indignation? Check . . . A novel set on the edge of the moment . . . It wouldn’t be an Ali Smith novel without linguistic fireworks; increasingly nor would it be one without a sense of moral indignation. Companion Piece is, to use the Smith cliché lexicon, “characteristically unclassifiable”, “predictably unpredictable” and “as freewheeling as a rollercoaster.” She is in grave peril of becoming a national treasure.”
—The Scotsman
  
“Companion Piece is a fitting title for Ali Smith’s 12th novel, her first after the extraordinary Seasonal Quartet. It’s a book that springs from the same source as its predecessors, written and published swiftly, it is about as real-time as novels get . . . It feels as if Smith so enjoyed the breakneck speed of writing her quartet that she has produced this: a companion piece . . .  The two parts of the novel reflect upon and enlarge each other, collapsing time and illustrating the way that problems . . . are rooted deeply in our collective histories . . .  Smith constructs her novels, with scenes and stories accreting over time, generating a vast but insidious power . . . Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious.”
—Alex Preston, The Guardian
 
“Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet of novels is one of the most interesting enterprises in recent fiction . . . They are quizzical, often very funny, and their apparently relaxed and voluble style cunningly disguises just what a high-wire act this is. We want these novels to go on talking, and not every writer achieves that . . . It’s all beautifully human, and the opposite of polemic. It understands the other point of view, as novels always have, and in the end shrugs off any idea that it might know best . . . A glorious, entertaining and expert portrayal of the world we live in, seen by the most beguiling and likeable of novelistic intelligences.”
—The Telegraph (UK)
 
“Smith’s serious intentions never dim her playful ingenuity. . . . Fusing polemic, poetry and disquisitions on nature and the arts, Smith creates a framework with which to dissect some of the most critical themes of our times . . . Smith is a celebrator of the paradox, of the cyclical nature of death and birth, endings and beginnings . . . Yet the implicit and explicit messages Smith is delivering through Companion Piece, as with the Seasonal Quartet, are that interconnectedness and community can triumph over disaffection and disconnection. Those are themes that do not date; a reminder in perilous times of the need for Smith’s wise, humane and generous voice—and the angry consolation her work provides.” 
—Financial Times (UK)

“Intricate . . . Expansive and tantalizing . . . As ever, Smith’s flawless stream-of-conscious narration is at once accessible and transforming, and with it she manages to contain eye-blinking hallucinatory images, such as a shattered clock that reconstitutes itself. This is a captivating Rubik’s cube of fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“[T]his touching entertainment . . . is Smith’s pandemic land, where myth and reality converse, where lockdown might evoke medieval artisanry, and where wordplay is more than playful. The Scottish author’s 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands . . . With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress. A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.“ 
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)ALI SMITH is the author of many works of fiction, including, most recently, Summer, Spring, Winter, Autumn, Public library and other stories, and How to be both, which won the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, the Goldsmiths Prize, and the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Her work has four times been short-listed for the Man Booker Prize. Most recently, she won the George Orwell Prize for Fiction for Summer. Born in Inverness, Scotland, she lives in Cambridge, England.Hello hallo hullo.

It’s comparatively quite a recent word. But like everything in language it has deep roots.
 
In all its forms, the dictionary says, it’s a variant of a word from Middle French, hola, a combination of ho and la, making something like hey there. It might also connect to the old hunting cry, halloo! for when you sight what you’re hunting and shout out with excitement as you start the chase. Or perhaps it might be closer to the sound of the word howl, like when Shakespeare uses it in Twelfth Night as one of the proofs of love when one character tells another that to prove this love she’d halloo your name to the reverberate hills till there’s nothing else left in the air or the world but the name of the beloved.
 
Or maybe it comes from the Old English word haelan, which is a very versatile verb that can mean to heal and to save and to greet all at once. Or from another Old English phrase altogether, one that means may you be hale, or may you be whole.
 
It’s possibly also the Old High German word you’d’ve shouted if you were at the side of a river and needed to get a ferryman’s attention. A form of it turns up in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, a poem about the terrible act and ominous aftermath of the killing of a bird, the fate of the sailor who kills it and the deadly fate of his companions. First the bird comes playfully to their hollo! and brings good sailing weather. Then the mariner kills it. After that everything turns into deadly stasis in the poem. After it, shout hollo! all they like, no bird comes.
 
In any of its forms, hello can mean all these things. We say it to someone we’ve just met, it’s a friendly and informal ritual gesture of greeting whether it’s someone we know or someone we’ve never met before.
 
It can mean someone’s surprised, or attracted, or caught off guard by something or someone, as in, hello, what’s this? /who’s this?
 
It can be a polite demand for attention; imagine you’re standing in a shop and the person you want to serve you has gone through the back, say, so you shout it. It can also suggest there might be nobody there at all. For instance, you’ve fallen down a well and are stuck at the bottom of it looking helplessly up at the small circle of light that’s the rest of the world and you’re shouting it in the desperation and hope that somebody will hear.
 
Or you answer a phonecall and you say it and nobody answers or there’s nobody there. So you say it again into the silence, more and more insistent each time,
 
hello?
 
hello?
 
Is anybody there?
 
Are you there and you can hear me but you’re just not replying for some reason?
 
Can you help me?
 
Oh now that definitely caught my attention.
 
What’s all this then?
 
What do you want?
 
Yes, I’m here.
 
Can you take me safely across in your boat?
 
Are we anywhere near land yet?
 
Please be well.
 
Please don’t be broken.
 
Please get better, be safe.
 
I love you and I’m going to plaster the universe with your name and my love.
 
I’m on your trail and I’m coming after you.
 
Eh, hi.
 
Good to see you again.
 
Good to meet you.
 
Every hello, like every voice – in all the possible languages, and human voice is the least of it – holds its story ready, waiting.
 
That’s pretty much all the story there is.
 
Round any telling of it, a deep green colour layered with grime and dust from all the seasons over a door in a wall, both the door and the wall invisible under the massive swath of ivy shifting its leaves in slight-breeze choreography, lit here and there by the brighter green of its newer leaves, the newest of these such small perfected leaf shapes already that it’s both ordinary and mindblowing and then there are the little plant teeth like roots coming off the tendrils reaching for and holding to whatever surface they touch, dogged, firm, working to become more root than tendril, the whole thing fed by a taproot so deep and tough that, whoever or whatever tries to cut it back or dig it out, here it comes all over again one unfurled leaf at a time.US

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