I'm not sure what to make of this book.
It entertained me, and at times amused me, bit I don't really think I understood it.
Despite that, it was very readable.
I've enjoyed all Smiths books I've read, and this one was no exception.

Companion Piece’s definitely the most inventive of the pandemic novels I’ve read so far, and the most explicitly, blisteringly angry, something I can easily identify with. As in her recent series of novels, Ali Smith’s latest’s composed of multiple overlapping and interwoven threads. The most prominent character’s Sandy Gray, a queer artist whose paintings build on a lifelong obsession with words and wordplay. Sandy’s anxious about her father who’s in hospital after a heart attack, barred from receiving visitors because of Covid risks. Sandy alone, except for her father’s aging Labrador, rails against the government, fake news, and a constant stream of needless deaths. Then, out of the blue she receives an unsettling call from an old college acquaintance and she’s drawn into a sinister mystery involving a priceless medieval lock; bizarrely demanding, near-Shakespearian twins; hallucinatory dreams; and what may, or may not, be a visitation from another time.

Smith’s highly referential narrative’s laced with soundbites, snippets from news headlines, literature and lines of poetry alongside strands of ancient legends. Smith abruptly shifts between registers, at one point drawing on British seaside humour, at another the kind of surreal, absurdist work I associate with British experimentalists like B. S. Johnson and N. F. Simpson. These in turn are juxtaposed with a medieval tale invoking the time immediately following the Black Death and the first stirrings of what, I assume, will be the Peasant’s Revolt. The addition of a mythical curlew, a source of fascination for poets and writers for centuries, allows for a meditation on death and renewal, as well as acting as a reminder of contemporary ecological disaster, as real-life curlews draw ever closer to extinction.

Perhaps key to Smith’s approach here’s the work of British fantasist Alan Garner, someone Smith’s written about in the past, a scene from Sandy’s childhood mirrors the moment when a seven-year-old Smith first discovered the lure of his enigmatic fiction and his radical ideas about language. The workings of the plot’s reminiscent of what Smith’s called his ”boundary moments, crossing places between the “real” and the “imagined” worlds, times and stories, the places where the very ordinary and the very unordinary coexist, leach into each other: the strangeness in the known, the familiar in the strange.” Even the form and expression of anger here echoes Smith’s feelings about Garner and his ability to communicate a palpable sense of unease and political fury. Although Smith’s book doesn’t have Garner’s sophistication and is, I think, unlikely to have his lasting appeal, it’s still a striking, timely piece. The execution can be quite heavy-handed and Smith’s sudden tonal shifts awkward and jarring but even so I found this sufficiently topical and thought-provoking to capture and hold my attention. I don’t think it’s one of Smith’s strongest novels but it’s still very much worth reading.