I really enjoyed this novel- like the seasons quartet it feels very of its time, particularly about Black lives matter and dealing with the pandemic. It described the feelings of that summer so well it was almost stressful to read. A deeply layered novel which will reward rereading.

This is a companion novel to the seasonal quartet. A lot of the book is based on the pandemic which may be upsetting for some. The writing style is beautiful

Safe to say that anyone familiar with Ali Smith's seasonal series will appreciate this addition to the set. Smith is one of the leading writers of our times and her series has successfully tracked the societal upheaval and tribulations of the last few years in the UK - Brexit, ecological anxiety, immigration, austerity, gender identity, fractured families, celebrity and cultural confusion and much more are beautifully woven into Smith's narrative and believable characters. Created quickly and instinctively each book in the set can be savoured on its own or as part of the bigger picture this is a modern masterpiece that deserves to be read by anyone who appreciates great fiction.

Beautifully written, clever, playful and surreal.

Amidst the confusion of a post-Brexit, mid-pandemic world, artist Sandy Gray receives a call out of the blue from a woman she barely knows, trying to answer a mysterious question.

Filled with wordplay and historical links, and capturing the heart of the confused and bizarre state of the world

An absolute delight to read.

The cleverness of Ali Smith's writing is always delightful. Companion Pieces concludes the group of novels which she has written contemporaneously to world events and how could she not tackle COVID in this manner? It's probably the most significant world event of modern time.

This book has the most straightforward narrative of the group and like the others enjoys word-play, literary references, some magic-realism and layers of storytelling. On saying this some readers looking for a straightforward read may struggle with the playfulness of Smith's storytelling.

Ali Smith writes with such humanity about whichever subject she tackles. The author's satisfaction with skewering the bizarre behaviour of the overly "woke" COVID sceptics shines through in the entertaining portrayal of Sandy's uninvited guests. The first part of this book is one of the most original COVID themed books to come out of these times.

The link to the second part is an intricate lock which sets the events of part one in motion. The lock's creator, a talented young woman, suffers exile and persecution for living a life which doesn't follow the expected norms.

My thanks to the publishers and Netgalley for an ARC and the opportunity to review this intriguing book.

Ali Smith’s fine novel starts as a mystery as an old acquaintance calls Sandy Gray out of the blue with a tale of a disembodied voice murmuring ‘curfew’ or ‘curlew’ whilst she is being held at an un-named border crossing. This is in the time of Covid-19 lockdowns and the protagonist Sandy is looking after her father’s dogs as he is in hospital. The call causes Sandy to reflect on her student days studying poetry and the etymology of language. The choice (between the two words) ‘is something to do with difference and sameness’. There are layers of wordplay (yoked and joke, forge and forget), double meanings and dissonance of meanings throughout the novel. . As a writer Sandy ‘layer-paints’ over her analysis of poems and indeed of reality itself.

Thanks to Netgalley and Penguin Random House UK.

Ali Smith has the knowledge to examine the needier side of us all, to come closer to our more human and emotional concerns than we could ever expect in a book. The imagery becomes increasingly brilliant as the themes, locales, and characters change. No one would seek to identify what defines our age with such precision without hoping for some sort of political conclusion, and we unquestionably need this type of politica discourse, considering the world we live in at the moment.
Smith has a way with words that really stands out. Plus the ability to seamlessly introduce the absurd and the bizarre. There are several literary allusions—many of which I am not aware of—but that is a me problem!
No one writes quite like Ali Smith

‘Companion Piece’ by Ali Smith is about truth, the telling of stories, real stories, fake stories, fairy stories, perceived truth and real truth, and how language and data can be used and abused. Smith tackles some of the biggest issues facing society today, not so much providing answers but making us ask questions about life and the modern concept of ‘truth.’ A ‘companion’ novella to Smith’s lockdown-themed Seasonal Quartet, ‘Companion Piece’ sings from the beginning.
Twining together present and past stories, two motifs run throughout. ‘Curfew,’ the idea of restriction of physical movement, on access and egress, the feeling of being constrained and the invasion of our space. And ‘curlew’, the freedom of nature, the bird’s odd-shaped bill, a reminder that there is room in nature for things that don’t quite fit the norm, the ever presence of wildlife whatever happens in the human world, the familiar pattern of a bird’s day, of nature’s life cycle and therefore also of ours.
Artist Sandy is struggling during lockdown to distance-visit her sick father who is in hospital. She must stay isolated and free of the virus so she doesn’t prejudice his health and is accompanied only by Shep, her father’s dog. Into this closed world comes Martina, an acquaintance from university many decades since, who telephones with an odd tale concerning an incident at border control when she recently returned to the UK with the Boothby lock (a medieval artefact for which Martina is responsible). Held in an immigration detention room, she hears (or imagine she hears) a mysterious message - ‘Curlew or curfew.’ Martina wants Sandy’s advice to decipher the message, as Sandy is good at words. Sandy, who barely remembers Martina, tries to help while simultaneously trying to end the call. There are flashbacks to their university days, to Sandy’s childhood.
Then Sandy’s peaceful isolation is shattered by the arrival on her doorstep of Martina’s twin daughters, Lea and Eden, whose speech is littered with text-speak abbreviations. They dismiss Sandy’s concerns about covid distancing and accuse her of upsetting their mother who is acting strangely and is changing information about historical artefacts in the digital database at work.
The second story (whether it is told by Sandy is unclear, like many things in this book) set in another pandemic, this time the Black Death. An unnamed young girl, a blacksmith’s apprentice, is lying in a ditch after being attacked by men. There she meets a curlew chick, an ungainly beautiful bird she begins to care for. As people around her die of plague, she remembers the stories told to her by the blacksmith Ann Shaklock and these help her to survive.
Any novel by such an experimental writer as Smith needs to be read with a loosening of expectations, acceptance of the abandonment of normal commercial fiction norms. Passages are beautifully written but incomprehensible, others are simple and sweet, some made me laugh out loud. Punctuation, speech marks, forget about them all and sink into the story of Sandy the artist who paints words layered on top of words.
Don’t expect answers at the end. As Sandy says, ‘A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.’ It is a plea for us all to ask more questions, to not simply believe what we are told but to analyse and strip back stories in order to separate fact from fiction, fake news from truth.
Read more of my book reviews at http://www.sandradanby.com/book-reviews-a-z/

I have read Ali Smith's work before and loved her writing but for some reason I never got round to the quartet. . I had heard this could be read as a stand alone and I loved the sound of it so went in blind.

You definitely do not need to have read the quartet to enjoy this. It's true Smith style , such beautiful writing and one of the most contemporary books I have read this year. There is a split narrative and the present day highlights events such as Covid, immigration , poverty, everything which we have faced / are facing now . . The whole concept of companionship is brought to the forefront, neighbours, family, carers , animals , each one is a companion in some form.

It's a modern day classic and one so relevant of 2022

🌿BOOK REVIEW🌿

Companion Piece by Ali Smith

“What is there to say to that loss? Everything becomes trivial next to it.”

This is 100% classic Ali Smith and if you enjoy her writing I absolutely recommend picking it up. It is exactly what it says on the tin- a Companion Piece to her seasonal quartet. It is a shorter book but has a large focus on the pandemic and the shift in society that happened during and “after” it.

This book brought up a lot of emotions that I honestly didn’t realise I had, it is the first book I have read that has spoken so bluntly about the pandemic. It was incredibly sad to read about people trying so hard to keep themselves safe, only do be belittled by others, and the discussions around identity were again very emotive.

I am glad I read this one!


⚠️CW// rape, gaslighting, COVID-19 pandemic

This "companion piece" to Ali Smith's seasonal quartet was a little more slippery than the other four but I think that was partly on purpose as we continue to live in slippery times, which are difficult to get a hold on. It took me a long time to read because there was lots to mull over and some of it felt quite prosaic and yet profound at the same time – again, Ali is no novice, this is all on purpose and reflective of the time in which we live. I was going to give it four stars because of this but, really, truly, compared to a lot of contemporary fiction this is five-star stuff. Life truly is stranger than fiction, and this author is fully aware of that, embraces it, and manages to draw out the smallest of everyday beauty amongst the absurdity. I loved the fever dream nature of the story, the jumping back and forth, the usual wordplay. The vision of the young blacksmith's apprentice and the curlew, which takes us back to a time when there was disaster in the form of the Great Fire and the Plague, when people were wary, superstitious, and needed any crumb of hope or certainty they could find, even if it meant making scapegoats of others. Even then there were wanderers, vagrants, vagabonds, seditionists, witches, Egyptians (gypsies) and all manner of "others" who could be blamed for society's woes.

It's a beautifully told story (I've read someone suggest it was written in one sitting); long may storytellers of Ali Smith's calibre continue to beguile us with these tales – which is what make us human – in troubled times.

Companion Piece is designed to look like - as the title states - a companion piece to Smith's beautiful and moving "Seasonal Quartet," but this connection is clearly the publisher's move and not the author's. While the book-as-object is just as beautifully designed as the others, once again featuring a David Hockney image on its cover, the narrative between those covers lacks the radiance of the other four texts. Smith's usual techniques of throwing characters together for quirky and thoughtful conversations about the nature of life and art doesn't quite work here, largely because most of those characters are unlikeable, unrealistic, and even quite infuriating. If Autumn set out to be the first Brexit novel, Companion Piece clearly seeks to be the first Covid one, and while it captures the anxieties of the mystifying experience of lockdown and seems to want to argue for the value of companionship in today's world, it doesn't succeed in making the case. Only when the novel switches gears 4/5s of the way through, to narrate a story set hundreds of years ago, does it capture the imagination with a brilliant, engrossing character and lyrical narration. This reader would have liked a whole book featuring just that narrative.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for approving me for this arc

Again, another great piece from Ali Smith. This woman does not disappoint. Literary fiction is amazing from this author.

Each time I read her writing it’s always so poetic which I love!

I loved Ali Smith's <i>Seasonal Quartet</I> so I was beyond excited to read her latest offering, a companion to those four novels that came before.

Smith's cleverness with words shines through. The absurd and the bizarre are present as well. Some entitled teenage twins and a vagrant girl make an appearance. There are many literary references, many of them unknown to me, but that's my problem.

This novel takes place during the pandemic, so some of the issues that prevailed at the height of Covid are front at centre.

In the Seasonal Quartet novels, Smith showcased different female artists. This time she focuses on a blacksmith woman from hundreds of years ago. I'm guessing it's a fictional character, I haven't checked.

I don't know if my cluttered brain and general mood had something to do with it, but I wasn't as enthralled with this novel as I was with Smith's previous works. Something was missing. There were moments that shone through, but they seemed to be covered up by a melange of disparate sequences that confused me and made me wonder if I had skipped pages.

Of course, I'll keep reading Smith.

I read and loved Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet so was delighted to discover Companion Piece, which sits alongside those novels. In this one it follows Sandy during the current pandemic when she is contacted, out of the blue, but a woman she hasn’t spoken to since her college days. Martina tells a story that has a conundrum around curfews and curlews. This leads to Sandy’s lockdown being interrupted by first Martina’s daughters, and later Martina herself. At the same time Sandy is coping with the fact that her father is in hospital, not covid-related, but still she can only speak to him via an ipad when the staff have time to help him. The novel captures the current times we’re living through. It looks at politics, gender, climate change; it’s about people and place, love and loneliness (and at times the wish to be alone). I really enjoyed this novel and I recommend it.

Fantastic followup to the seasonal quartet. As always, Smith writes beautifully - this one feels somewhat angrier than the rest but brilliant.

'Every hello, like every voice - in all the possible languages, and human voice is the least of it - holds its story, waiting.
That's pretty much all the story there is.'

A companion piece to the Seasonal Quartet? It seems so, but it stands on its own, firmly and proudly, as yet another masterclass in novel writing from Ali Smith.

Sandy Gray, an artist, receives a phone call from a woman she hardly knows, someone she perhaps spoke to once during her time at college many years ago. What Martina Inglis has to say involves a complicated and bizarre story involving a Boothby lock and a mysterious voice with an even more mysterious message: 'Curlew or curfew: you choose'.

As the story progresses - in so far as an Ali Smith story does progress in a linear way - Sandy finds her lockdown isolation invaded gradually by Martina's family. There is also a strange girl who appears in her house, a first appearance of a second story which starts with 'Curfew' and is set in a plague-ridden past and involves a female blacksmith and social outcast. There are stories within stories as the narrative builds an ever-more layered form. And, as is Smith's want, there are references to any number of books, poems, pieces of music, each of which adds an extra subtle layer of meaning and metaphor, exactly as Sandy's own paintings add layer upon layer.

The Covid pandemic is a shaping device, with Sandy's father in hospital (non-Covid related) and so visits are restricted. It's hard to say 'Hello' behind a screen or a mask. There is a barely contained and palpable sense of anger, too, at the wider political establishment, from the Covid response to refugees to Black Lives Matter. And above all there are words and imagery, but words mostly. From word-play to puns to sheer dazzling paragraphs, this novel again proves that no-one can write quite like Ali Smith, and no-one can explore and explain the sheer wonder of language like her. At one point Sandy says to one of Martina's daughters:

'It's one of this era's real revolutions. And one of the most exciting things about language, that grammar's as bendy as a live green branch on a tree. Because if words are alive to us then meaning's alive, and if grammar's alive then the connection in it, rather than the divisions in us, will be energizing everything, one way or another. It means an individual person can be both individual and plural at the same time.'

That pretty much sums it up, all the ideas and themes running through Ali Smith's work. 'Companion Piece' is precisely that: a companion piece to all her work, not just the Seasonal Quartet. A celebration of surviving, of being, and of being in the moment. It's a celebration of stories and the words that make those stories. It is kind and compassionate and angry and important. Ali Smith doesn't easily give answers, but makes us ask the questions we need to ask.

(With thanks to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this title.)

I was pleased to be invited to review this short novel, as the title suggests, the companion to the Seasons Quartet. Effectively challenging the idea of a quartet by adding a fifth element.

Ali Smith loves to play around with the concept of the novel. Here she offers the experiences of living alone in the pandemic, worrying about a family member in hospital, not striken with Covid. Vovidly portrayed and relatable.

While caring for the family pet, the reclusive artist finds herself besieged by a acquaintance from university and her daughters, who drive her from her own home and studio with their presence and impossible behaviour,

The action moves to the past, exploring other life experiences and ideas.

As with most of her other work, you simply have to allow yourself to travel along with Ali Smith and accept that some of her leaps of thought might be hard to follow but will make sense in the end. She's such a magical, challenging and experimental writer. Take the journey with her!

I love Ali Smith’s books and the use of language is extraordinary. This is not her usual novel and, I’m sure, very influenced by lockdown. An artist, living alone and worrying about her father who’s in hospital. She’s unable to visit much due to covid and speaks to his nurse for updates. The rest of the story is a mix of characters and it’s hard to determine what is true. I was a little frustrated about the random stories but I can imagine that an author may feel stifled during lockdown and their imagination could run riot.

PUBLISHER’S DESCRIPTION:

'A story is never an answer. A story is always a question.'

Here we are in extraordinary times.
Is this history?

What happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other?
What have we lost?
What stays with us?
What does it take to unlock our future?

Following her astonishing quartet of Seasonal novels, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its forms.

'Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting.'

NO SPOILERS

Ali Smith’s Companion Piece, which follows on from her Seasonal Quartet, defies definition and how the heck do I review it?! Written with the same premise, but this time during 2021 amidst lockdown, police disgrace, political absurdity, public distrust and every other challenge we all faced, all of which are present in the narrative. And we are all companions in this.

There is scathing satire, astute wit and sharp observation. There is symbolism, allegory, near as damn it fable. There is wisdom, calling to account, social commentary. There are magical tales, harrowing truths, parallels.. it’s all here and it’s all written in Smith’s superb style. Her word play is, as ever, the star of this book.

So, suffice to say, it’s one heck of an achievement.


Thank you to NetGalley and Penguin for the Advanced Review Copy of the book, which I have voluntarily reviewed.