‘ Piece’ for people who love language
Ali Smith follows seasonal books with pandemic tale
When we first encounter Sandy Gray in “Companion Piece” she is in a sorry state, beyond caring, even about a bit of wordplay, though all her life she’s “loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick.” So it’s a measure of her recaptured mojo, or more likely of Ali Smith’s unfailing wizardry, that by the end of this brief novel the mere word “hello” had me near tears.
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-toofamiliar 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.
Actually, the story’s already pretty strange by the time our medieval heroine, a girl with a bird on her shoulder and a smithy’s tools in hand, mysteriously appears in our present-day heroine’s house. We’re prepared for a modicum of magic from the start, when we find Sandy entertaining Cerberus, the mythical three-headed guard dog of the underworld. This, under the nonplussed gaze of Shep, the dog Sandy is taking care of for her father, who’s in the hospital – not the virus, she is quick to say, heart stuff – though of course the virus infects everything.
What sets the plot in motion, or at least starts Sandy out of her doldrums, is a late-night call from a woman she hasn’t spoken to for decades: Martina Pelf has had a peculiar experience that wants deciphering, and so she thinks of
Sandy, a college acquaintance. Martina’s story involves her transporting the 16thcentury Boothby Lock, “a very important historical artefact and a stunning example of workmanship in blacksmithery,” for a museum and ending up in a locked room in an airport where a bodiless voice says to her, “Curlew or curfew.” Then it adds: “You choose.”
Unpack that. Well, Sandy tries. And for her trouble somehow ends up with the whole weird Pelf family descending on her, maskless, prompting her to flee to her father’s house with Shep. The accumulating Pelfs give the book a funny farcical momentum, against which “Companion Piece’s” other stories incidentally unfold.
Sandy, like her author, is a word person (an artist, to her father’s chagrin, who does visual representations of poems by painting one line atop another), and her narration is alive to the music and light of language, whether she’s parsing an E. E. Cummings poem for Martina or explaining the etymology of a word like curfew or making sly allusions or silly puns.