I have enjoyed everything I’ve read by Ali Smith. Usually I go for character-driven novels with distinct settings but that isn’t the appeal here - her characters flit in and out and we leap from one setting to another abruptly. I think it’s probably the sheer exuberance of her writing (even though her themes are rather dark), the wordplay I’ve come to look forward to from her and the literary references (most of which are lost on me until I do some online research and learn something). I cannot try to analyse too deeply what’s going on in the often surreal situations she creates, just go with the flow and enjoy the journey downstream. On this occasion I was much taken with the twins, not only the horror of them and their mother invading Sandy’s personal space, but the generation gap shown in their manner and conversation - the author really nails that for me. A joy to read, as ever.

Quite possibly my favourite of the seasonal cycle (can we count it as such, as a kind of addendum to that series? It should certainly form part of a single-volume, in future...). And therefore probably Ali Smith's crowning achievement. Very upset to finish this, in fact -- can't she just go round again? We need more of this -- a deeply humane and indispensable riposte to a devilish government / police / media, none of whom would ever read it, but for the rest of us -- vital literary medicine.

An Ali Smith novel is always difficult to summarise: they are literary palimpsests, many layered and intricate and impossible to pick apart. Companion Piece is no exception: there are so many different readings you could take from this book.

It's essentially a state of the nation narrative set during lockdown, but really it covers so much more of that: Smith toys with themes, time and language throughout. She is one of those writers who packs her work with references and wisdom, but somehow manages to keep her work inclusive, bringing the reader along with her rather than shaming them for what they might not know (and I'm sure there are many references I missed!).

In fact, even if you don't catch any of the references, Companion Piece is still a joy to read if only for the wonderful fluidity of the stream of consciousness prose. It's slippery and disorientating and playful, a contemporary take on modernist style.

Intelligent and elegant, Companion Piece may have been written as a companion to the season quartet, but it's also an excellent novel in its own right.

After the absolute tour de force of the Seasonal Quartet, written in as close to real time as possible, this too charts the uncomfortable waters we find ourselves in, set in part against the backdrop of COVID, lockdown and the global pandemic.

Smith is so acutely observant, it is an absolute joy to read her. Here, we have a kaleidoscopic array of tales that act like a prism, each narrative strand crossing the other to create moments of stark clarity and intersection. This is an exploration of companionship in different iterations and stories, which feed into and loop back upon themselves and each other.

As the reader you find your perspective and understanding changing from story to story and person to person. It all seems to depend where you stand in relation to each other here, which is, of course, a way of thinking of companionship. And as much as this has to do with presence and connection, there is always the counterpoint, absence and isolation, swinging back into view as everything shifts around you.

Words work hard for Smith and yet she handles them so deftly and so playfully it is a pleasure to watch her unpack and rebuild meaning before your eyes. This is funny, charming, perfectly observed and has exactly the right amount of darkness and bite to salt the tale.

You could read this a dozen times and find something new to enjoy every time you read it.

Another brilliant page turner from Ali Smith! She'd set the bar pretty high with her Seasonal Quartet but Companion Piece is just as powerful. Granted, there is a certain strangeness to Ali Smith's novels, but it is a familiar sort of strangeness, that still carries its message clearly. Among all the great British writers around at the moment, it's hard to find one who is as good a commentator of the society we live in as Ali Smith. Not only that, but her playful handling of words and stories is the work of a virtuoso, and an absolute joy to read.

I was excited to read this when I saw it on Netgalley as was initially attracted by gorgeous purple cover and David Hockney art work. I have experienced difficulty previously when attempting to read this authors work. However after having watched and enjoyed the short film she produced for last years online Hay Festival, I felt drawn to give this writer another go. As ever Smith strongly ties her work to current events set in and around the UK Lockdown and it is this that makes it so relatable and appealing to the reader.

It is a novel of two halves . The first section being a classic example of what Ali Smith does so well – a combination of how current affairs affect us in our daily lives and the mundane of the everyday with beautiful poetic language. It examines companionship in all its forms – friends, father and daughter, siblings and highlights the loneliness and failed communication of lockdown . However the second section veered from these themes and relates the tale of a female 14th Century locksmith whereupon it becomes unclear how it relates to the first section or what the authors intention was. As reader I am left once more wondering I am just not intelligent enough to grasp what everyone else is seeing in this authors work. However I did really enjoy the first section chronicling Sandy Grey’s experiences during lockdown and due to the quality of her prose and skillful use of wordplay I certainly would pick up her works in future.

Like the seasonal quartet, Companion Piece's narrative voice grabs you from the opening and doesn't let go. Covering covid, grief and all kinds of other concerns, it's pleasingly uneven, wildly imaginative and often very funny. Difficult to summarise, its central figure, Sandy, is coming to terms with her father's death, trying to escape from the family of a Martina, a long-lost not-quite friend from university, and hallucinating herself, and the narrative, (perhaps via covid) into post-Plague England. I think the novel is about being thrown into a series of unprecedented and uncanny situations, starting with the remarkable medieval Boothby Lock, which prompts Martina to contact Sandy at the beginning of the book, and which then disappears, picked only obliquely via the 14th century blacksmith scenes. Ali Smith is taking risks here, many of which pay off, and traces of the book are likely to stay with the reader for some time. "As story is always a question", Sandy says at one point, and there are few answers here but lots to think about. Smith captures the anger that's characterised so much of recent years but is able to transform it into a more positive force. When she recalls strangers berating her in her house for having too many books, Sandy's reflection is that books are important because "they're one of the ways we can imagine ourselves otherwise". Companion Piece shows both the importance of that imagining and how difficult it is.



Ello ello ello

Companion Piece by Ali Smith. Ali Smith follows her groundbreaking Seasonal Quartet with this update focusing on the Covid-19 pandemic.

Ali Smith is a national treasure. In Companion Piece she mobilises the remarkable skill honed by the Seasonal Quartet to tackle the anger, anxiety, boredom, frustration and grief caused by Covid. It focuses on Sandy, an artist enraptured with words whose father is hospitalised with a heart issue in the middle of the lockdown. While Sandy struggles with the overwhelming situation an acquaintance, Matina, gets in touch with a strange tale of an unpleasant encounter with passport control. Their discussion sparks a series of events that brings Martina's grown twins to Sandy's door, and into her house despite her attempts to maintain social distancing.

Companion Piece is full of Smith's elegant and playful wordplay, her witty dialogue and that slightly surreal edge that always present in her work. She weaves a rich tapestry of poetry, literary criticism, political events and current events. It's best to just immerse yourself at let the glorious prose wash over you. It's limpid and tender as a new bruise but, oh, it burns with fury at the failure of our institutions, from government to the police. Less perfectly contemporaneous than the Seasonal Quartet it is also more rounded as she looks back at the earliest days of Covid from the perspective of a nation wearily, warily trying to "live with" the virus that turned our world upside down and had left us with the worst (still rising) death toll in Europe. It's a powerful perspective and leaves us with a phrase she repeats more than once. A warning. Not out of the woods yet

Somewhere between 3-3.5

A new Ali Smith novel is always A Literary Event (in the UK at least), so my expectations for this were always going to be high. A "companion" to the Seasonal Quarter published between 2016-2020, Smith's latest offering follows a similar formula to Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer - and also has a David Hockney painting on the cover of the UK edition to boot - Companion Piece tackles the pandemic, lockdown and is a 'state of the nation' novel tackling very current topics.

I found the novel to be very readable, but a mere two days later I find that I am left with very little to say about it beyond that: the writing was dazzling at times, but I am not sure I quite got the Pelf twins or what Smith was trying to say with the broader plot and themes. I wanted more of Sandy and her dad, and found the narrative a bit too fragmented for my personal taste. Worth a try if you liked the Seasonal Quartet, but it's probably my least favourite of Smith's most recent work.

I'm starting this with my head in a spin, very much like Martina when she goes to Sandy for help interpreting an e.e. cummings poem while they are at university. It's a fascinating ball of confusion, choices, and clever word 'smithery' taking us on a journey into all kinds of random, often surreal incidents which somehow works. I have no idea how Ali Smith manages it but there you go!

Sandy Gray is an artist who layers words of a poem on top of each other, very much like the author does in the novel. It's the pandemic and Sandy's father is in hospital with heart trouble and she is unable to visit. She gets a phone call out of the blue from Martina Inglis who she knew from university, although the two could hardly be described as friends and they haven't seen each other since. Martina is now a curator of a national museum and she tells a bizarre story central to which is a fascinating medieval lock and key mechanism. Later, Martina will lock and key a very reluctant Sandy into her own family drama. Their conversation takes Sandy on a journey down memory lane back to childhood and university days and also propels us seemingly bizarrely to scenes that include a medieval blacksmith's apprentice - presumably/maybe a link to the lock and key or a realistic dream ! Along the frequently diverting path, Sandy meets (not that she wants to and who can blame her) Martina's family, there are angry political references and outbursts, clever discussions on words and their origins, thoughts on companions and the inclusion of poetry and literature and the one I especially enjoy is the fakery of the Cottingley fairies. To what can we attribute that allusion I wonder???!! What emerges is an almost surreal but incredibly creative conundrum, a hallucination, with touches of the supernatural and magical, interspersed with some highly pertinent and thought provoking observations some of which make me laugh they are so apt. Yes it's strange, odd, I sometimes lose the thread and puzzle over her thought jumps but it's never boring - far from it! In places it's thoughtful, on occasions poignant and sometimes a hilarious mishmash of ideas.

Some of the parts I enjoy the most are with the millennial CELINE twins (Martina's daughters) which is like they have dropped from an age divide planet! Lea would make the most excellent spin doctor and maybe that's the point, who knows? Maybe others will find their inclusion controversial but I find they certainly liven things up, even if they are impossible!

Overall, you cannot sum this book up easily, it's enigmatic, puzzling and yet despite some head scratching ... I actually love it! Perhaps it's because my mind flits in a way that is logical to me yet frequently leaves my husband scratching his head!!! I really like the more optimistic hello on which it ends - maybe after all Martina does Sandy a favour.

With thanks to NetGalley and especially to Penguin General/Hamish Hamilton for the much appreciated arc in return for an honest review.

It’s just a joy to read Ali Smith creative usage of language and wordplay and then suddenly there’s the a tale of a young blacksmith her bird and it’s just pure, magnificent storytelling. Ali Smith is a wondrous writer, I only wish this book would have been longer so I could read more of her thoughts on art, the state of the world and the letter V.

Companion Piece is set in 2021, when the covid pandemic still has it's grip on the country. It is told from the perspective of Sandy, an artist, who's father is currently in hospital. This particular aspect of the story I enjoyed as it showed the difficulty for relatives with family members in hospital, dealing with the restrictions and the extra mile the staff go to, to support those families and help keep them connected.

After this, I honestly just couldn't follow the plot. I found it hard to understand if Sandy was describing dreams or real life a lot of the time. There was a plot line relating to a connection with an old college friend and then her children as well as then trying to connect all of that to a young girl from the 14th century. For me, I just couldn't tie it all together.

Ali Smith is clearly lyrical in her writing with a lot of word play and I admire that but unfortunately for me I couldn't balance this out with a plot and struggled.

Normally I love novels like this but for some reason I couldn’t get into it. I picked it up and put it down so many times that it left me frustrated.

We are all have preferences about books - pet hates and annoyances, favourite themes and styles. For me, if I can't have both style and substance in a novel, I'll go for substance (a decent plot and good story) over style (the way it is written) any day. This book is definitely style over substance, so I am not a fan, but I can also appreciate that other readers will feel differently.

'Companion Piece' is set in 2021 and mostly told from the perspective of Sandy, an artist who becomes unwillingly involved with a dysfunctional family whilst also dealing with her elderly father's hospitalisation during the pandemic. There is a link of some kind (I describe it that way as I don't understand it better than that!) with a young woman mistreated in the 14th century. Usually a paragraph like this in a review would give an introduction to the basic plot without going too far and getting into spoiler territory. But with 'Companion Piece' that is the entire plot and it doesn't develop beyond that. You can't give spoilers as it doesn't go anywhere.

What it lacks in plot, is made up for (or not, depending what you find most important in a book) by clever wordplay, literary trickery and general wordiness. For me I don't care how clever the author is, I just want a good story. One reason I dislike books like this is the suspicion I'm somehow not erudite enough to 'get' it. On the other hand, maybe that's why these books succeed - from an 'emperors new clothes' perspective with no one wanting to come out and say they're the one person who finds the whole thing completely baffling. Very occasionally I do love a book simply for the way it is written rather than what happens in it, but that tends to be when the writing is beautiful, rather than showy-off. I would describe the writing here as the latter rather than the former.

The characters are not sympathetic or believable. Another aspect that really annoyed me about the novel is the depiction of two younger characters (from the so called 'Millennial' generation) as shallow, overly politically correct and humourless. This characterisation seems to crop up in every novel by authors over a certain age now, and it's as unoriginal as it is inaccurate and patronising. News flash for novelists - it's not funny, it's not clever, and it just makes you look sneering and out of touch. You begin to wonder if these writers have actually met any young people recently. It's particularly annoying in this book as in other places Smith shows flashes of perceptiveness.

There are magical-realist elements to the book, which I didn't know what to make of, and very little of the behaviour of the characters is plausible. Probably the best section is towards the end where there is a chapter from the perspective of the aforementioned 14th century girl. Little bits like that show that Smith is able to write things that I enjoy reading. But the totality of this novel is not something I would recommend to readers with similar taste to my own. If you studied literature and like words for the sake of words, you may find it enjoyable. If you look for books that have stories you can get lost in, characters you care about, and some semblance of reality (even if that's in a fantasy setting) then this isn't one for you.

A new Ali Smith book is always cause for celebration for me and this one was no exception. I was particularly excited to read it because I had thoroughly enjoyed the Seasonal Quartet and this book promised to be… well, a companion piece!

Like most of Smith’s books, it’s hard to pin down what it’s really ABOUT, except that it’s about life, people and *gestures vaguely* here and now. Sometimes strange, sometimes poignant, but always enjoyable because you’re in the hands of an author who’s a master of her craft.

Thanks to the author, publisher and NetGalley for providing a review copy in exchange for honest feedback.

"I didn’t care what season it was. I didn’t even care what day of the week. Everything was mulch of a mulchness to me right then. I even despised myself for that bit of wordplay, though this was uncharacteristic, since all my life I’d loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick. But right then even words and everything they could and couldn’t do could fuck off and that was that."

Ali Smith's seasonal quartet was one of the literary highlights of recent years, drawn together magnificently in the final volume, and while I loved the series I was looking forward to see what she did differently in her next work. Disappointingly, Companion Piece, as the name hints, seems like a re-hash of the same style of book, but without the inter-novel links of the quartet. Smith's strong compassion for the suffering of others is in companion with her anger at those she sees as causing it, and her disdain what the country is still going through blazes as fiercely as ever.

"But when she holds it in her arms she can feel its bones so thin that the pain that’s unlike any other pain happens in her chest. This is the pain of the thought of something painful happening to another being. This is pain sensed or the thought of it happening in another body by the body of the person not feeling that same pain but feeling this thing that’s both pain and unlike pain instead."

Despite the quote which opens my review, Smith's weapon remains that of word play, which is as sharp as ever:

"He’s saying death’s a game, she says. Which it really isn’t.

Or saying there’s a way to be playful even in times of really terrible doubt? I say.

Ah, she says. I like that. Even when the day is dark and the sky is falling and things and words and everything they mean are falling to pieces all around you."

At the plot level though I struggled, with certain parts appearing almost random such as the bizarre inclusion of two twins, one spouting three-letter acronyms and the other (or was it the same one) deciding they were non-binary. It wasn't at all clear what Smith wanted to say or what she was satirising (it seemed like she was poking fun at those rejecting binary identities or gendered pronouns, which I suspect wasn't her intention, but I've no idea what was). One of the lessons of the quartet was that there was usually method to Smith's madness, but as of now I am struggling to see it and I wonder if we will see more companions to this book.

A reluctantly disappointed 3 stars

This is Ali Smith’s follow-up to her brilliant Seasonal Quartet, a set of books I got to know quite well in the period 2016-2020 because each time a new volume came out I re-read all the preceding ones (yes, that means I read Autumn four times). Those four books are, I think, best viewed as a single work, as what the book blurb here quotes the New Statesman saying “state-of-the-nation novels which understand that the nation is you, is me, is all of us”. In my review of Summer, the conclusion of the quartet, I noted that even though Smith didn’t write the books to be from a Christian perspective, that’s how they read to me with the first three volumes (picking up on the New Statesman’s “you, me and all of us”) considering attitudes towards your neighbour, yourself and other countries. And this book, as its title suggests, picks up on those kinds of themes and runs a bit further with them.

A key element of all five of these books has been their contemporaneousness (I had to check that was a real word and once I knew it was I had to use it!): each novel has been published very quickly after being written and has reflected very current trends. We’ve had Brexit, climate change, immigration detention centres and now COVID. Reading the books can turn out to be a multi-layered experience. If you read them on publication, you get one experience when all the events are recent and fresh. Then you read them again and you get a different experience. The fourth time I read Autumn, a lot had happened in-between!

The hardest part of writing this review was deciding where to start. There’s a point in this book when the main character, Sandy Gray, is talking about an e.e. cummings poem and she says "Anyone could choose a single phrase of this poem and write fifteen different papers about it". I felt that kind of confusion as I thought about what to write here!

But, at the end of the novel, there’s one phrase that particularly echoes around in my thoughts: ”Not out of the woods yet.” It’s a phrase used to describe Sandy’s father who spends the novel in hospital (and we all know that wasn’t a fun place to be during COVID, especially for the NHS staff who get a specific thank you from Smith in the acknowledgements at the end of the book). It’s a phrase that bookends the novel (as do three hellos). But it is also a phrase echoed by the Hockney image used on the cover of the book which shows a woodland scene. This is the overriding impression I come away from the book with: we (you, me, all of us) are not out of the woods yet.

And we (you, me, all of us) have choices to make. When you open the book the first thing you see is an almost blank page with just two words on it: “You choose”. This phrase feeds quickly into the narrative when Sandy receives a call from someone she knew at college, but has not seen for year, who tells her about a weird experience she had where she heard a voice saying “Curlew or curfew. You choose.” It is from this phrase that, appropriately, the story takes flight and spreads its wings to include a real curlew, blacksmiths (especially female ones) and lock making, the Cottingley Fairies, Paul McCartney’s Wings, and politics (there has to be politics). And so much more (which is why I didn’t really know how to start). I haven’t, for example, mentioned the apparently time-travelling vagrant who appears in Sandy’s house and whose story then suddenly appears in the novel.

I think this is a book that will reveal more of its layers as more of my friends read it (I hope they will read it) and we get to discuss it. It feels like a multi-layered novel which is appropriate because Sandy is an artist who takes poems and creates artwork from them by layering the words of the poems on top of one another. I really enjoyed the experience of reading it, but I feel I will enjoy it even more when I talk to other people about it. We (you, me, all of us) could have a lot of interesting conversations.

I was pleased to see that Ali Smith had written this 'Companion Piece' as it felt like her seasonal quartet had unfinished business; the Covid-19 pandemic was just beginning to read its head in Smith's concluding instalment, 'Summer', an event far more cataclysmic than the Brexit vote which was the starting point for the first volume, 'Autumn'. So it's good to see having the chance to tackle the pandemic and its implications in greater depth here.
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This is another enjoyably strange and surreal read mostly written from the perspective of Sandy Gray, an artist who paints the words of poems on top of each other, and whose father is in hospital at the height of the pandemic. At the beginning of the novel, she received a phone call from Martina Inglis, a woman she knew a little (and liked less) at university thirty years before, who tells her a bizarre story of being detained with a rare historical artefact in an airport for several hours; Sandy will later have to fend off unsolicited visits from other members of Martina's family. She also looks back on her childhood and university years, reflects on her mother who left her when she was a child, and tells a puzzling story about discovering an intruder in her house. There are other elements to the book too, including a long section set in the distant past about a female blacksmith's apprentice. The links between these different strands are often dizzying and obscure, but there is a kind of mad energy to Smith's writing which propels one through the story, and various hidden connections surface as the book progresses (no doubt more would emerge on a second reading.)

Alongside this approximation of a plot, Smith offers many reflections on the world and country we currently live in. As with her previous books, this is about much more than just the pandemic, and we are treated to another fully-fleshed state-of-the-nation novel that manages to condense so much of what we have lived through over the last couple of years into a quietly simmering rage - alongside lockdowns and PPE shortages, Smith weaves in references to the recent scandals in the Met police, the refugee crisis, cancel culture and much more. In many ways, I found this the most impressive part of the novel, especially as it is so current. There have now been quite a lot of pandemic novels, but not all have found anything particularly worthwhile to say: the last couple of years have made social commentators of us all, and some novels have seemed mainly to repeat the observations and truisms we've all made about how life has changed. In 'Companion Piece', however, the immediacy of Smith's writing compared with her broader focus lends depth and real insight to her commentary.

I imagine Smith's writing might not be to everyone's taste, but if you enjoyed the Seasonal Quartet, then you will probably like this extra volume. Many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

A new book by Ali Smith is always something to look forward to and Companion Piece is timely and challenging and also moving.

Ali Smith has built her already strong pre 2016 reputation (Encore Prize, 2 x Whitbread/Costa Novel Prize, Women’s Prize, Goldsmith’s Prize) with her fantastic seasonal quartet, published between 2017 and 2020 and which lead the New Statesman to proclaim “Ali Smith is the National Novelist We Need”.

Those books can I think be described in a number of ways:

As a form of literary and artistic palimpsest (the latter an idea Smith has played with in many of her previous books) as Smith makes a novel by building up the work of conceptual artists (Pauline Boty, Barbara Hepworth, Tacita Dean, Lorenza Mazetti respectively in each season).

As an engagement with topical (the books reflect national trends as they were written and were published almost as soon as written – Smith has talked about restoring the true meaning of novel) using wordplay to engage with topics such as Brexit, climate change and immigration;

This book is her follow up to that quartet.

It, like that quartet, has a very similar David Hockney cover of a path through woods (an idea I think is important – see below)

It has a similar emphasis on topical events: Summer was almost finished as COVID hit (I read a final version in June 2020) and Summer rather serendipitously had a quarantine theme, but otherwise had little on COVID, here it (as well as the NHS) are central to the novel, with anti-immigration themes as key here as throughout the quartet

And while not having many of the overlapping characters or other recurring motives (Charles Dickens, Eduardo Boubat’s “petite fille aux feuilles mortes jardin du Luxembourg Paris 1946”, S4A, Charlie Chaplin, TV links – albeit with reference to the last two the book does open with some “music-hall comedy language”)

It has some familiar Ali Smith devices:

The split time but also convergent storylines of “How to be Both” – with the “You Choose” heading of the novel and the Curlew/Curfew sections: one largely present day, one largely past seeming to follow that book’s idea of a novel which one could literally read in two different orders (note that the idea of repeating a book front to back or back to front is a key to the novel’s protagonist’s work);

One of her favourite devices (which seems to feature in many of her novels) a fey young girl with time/physic defying powers;

Heavy reference to other artists: here explicitly the poetry of ee cummings (with something of a literary interpretation of one of his poems included in the text) Dylan Thomas’s “In the White Giant’s Thigh, Robert Burns writing on “are we a piece of machinery …….. or [if there] something within us above the trodden clod” (note both these latter pieces refer to curlew’s – a vital theme of the novel); and more implicitly – by not much more than a book picked up - the work of Alan Garner (this 2015 article – unfortunately behind a partial paywall – appears to say a lot about the novel’s conception https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2016/05/history-violence-ali-smith-alan-garner)

Characters names as word play (Shifting Sand here for the main modern day character of the novel: Sandy Gray)

But perhaps most of all this novel felt to me more autobiographical (or perhaps more personal) than the quartet.

Sandy Gray as a child is a fan of the same Alan Garner novel as Ali Smith was at the same age;

In what seems to me a reversal of Smith’s work on the quartet – Sandy is a conceptual artist whose work consist of taking a novel and painting each word of the novel in turn (sometimes front to back, sometimes back to front) onto a canvas

And perhaps most crucially at the start of the novel- Sandy, who is we learn over time, was from a young age both a master herself with word play and politically active is at the novel’s start worn down (by the corruption of the government, by the mass of COVID deaths it has overseen, and by the hospitalisation with heart disease of her father who bought her up largely as a single parent) which leads her to say (in words we can imagine Ali Smith herself expressing post her quartet) as everything she despaired of in the quartet and against which she wrote with the hope and optimism which is a key distinguisher of her work from the merely polemical, only seemed to get worse:

"Everything was mulch of a mulchness to me right then. I even despised myself for that bit of wordplay, though this was uncharacteristic, since all my life I’d loved language, it was my main character, me its eternal loyal sidekick. But right then even words and everything they could and couldn’t do could f--- off and that was that"

But while Sandy retains her anger and polemic – she is also inspired:

Firstly by a bizarre story told to her by a girl she met once at college about a mysterious voice she heard while in detention at a both bureaucratic and racist immigration control (all familiar Smith themes) – a story which via a late medieval/early renaissance piece of English metalwork the Boothby lock (real to the book but I think fictional) ends with a disembodied voice and a consonant change challenge – “Curlew or Curfew, You choose”

Secondly by a visitation from a young girl who seems to be a branded vagrant from another ear and whose story we (probably) then later follow

And Smith, that master of wordplay in the cause of social activism and engagement, while also retaining her anger, is equally inspired not to give up but instead to return to her ideas, in a story which takes in:

The companionship of a girl and an actual curlew and that of a old man and his an ageing labrador

The rather bizarrely entitled and verbalised-TLA-spouting grown up twin children of her ex-college friend; colonialism and sectarianism in early 20th Century Ireland;

Blacksmithery (particularly female blacksmithery) and mythical stories of Vulcan;

Social activism in the late medieval period;

“The Scarlet Letter” (and medieval branding);

The Cottingley Fairies (what is one to make of a story about how society was fooled by fake fairies in an author so prone to her fey young female protagonists) and so much more beside

Finally and (remembering the Hockney paintings) Sandy’s standard response when asked about her father – a response whose importance I think is reflected in it appearing on both the third page of the novel and then again three pages from the end (and symmetry and reversal of book order is another key theme) is “not out of the woods yet”

Is this perhaps what Smith is also signalling both in this continuation and companion piece to her own quartet and in her choice of a Hockney wood-path cover that we too as a country are not out of the woods and that neither is her writing. Much as I mourn the first I can only celebrate the second.