A book of two halves, one of which I thoroughly enjoyed; the other I struggled to engage with at all. I remembered vaguely as I was reading that this was originally published in two different versions; you wouldn’t know beforehand whether the historical or contemporary storyline would come first. As it happened, my library paperback opened with the contemporary storyline.

New Year’s, and the start of George’s first full year without her mother, a journalist who died of an allergic reaction at age 50. Her mother’s major project was “Subvert,” which used Internet pop-ups to have art comment on politics and vice versa. George remembers conversations with her mother about the nature of history and art, and a trip to Italy. She’s now in therapy, and has a flirty relationship with Helena (H), a mixed-race school friend.

Smith’s typical wordplay comes through in the book’s banter, especially in their George and H’s texts. George is a whip-smart grammar pedant. Her story was a joy to read. There is even a hint of mystery – is it possible her mother was being monitored by MI5? When George skips school to gaze at her mother’s favorite Francesco del Cossa painting in the National Gallery, she thinks she sees Lisa Goliard, her mother’s intense acquaintance, who said she was a bookbinder but acted more like a spy…

The second half imagines a history for Francesco del Cossa, who rises from a brick-making family to become a respected portrait and fresco painter. The artist shares outward similarities with George, such as a dead mother and homoerotic leanings. There are numerous tiny connections, too, some of which I will have missed as my attention waned. In any dual-timeline novel, I prefer the contemporary one and am impatient to get back to it; of course, here, that wasn’t going to happen. (At least in books like Unsheltered and The Liar’s Dictionary there are alternate chapters to look forward to if the historical material gets tedious.) The modern lingo felt all wrong for the time period. I felt Smith wasn’t fully invested in the past, so I wasn’t either.

An intriguing idea, a very promising first half, and then a drift into pretension. Or was that all just my failure to observe and appreciate? (Smith impishly mocks: “only if you notice. If you notice, it changes everything about the picture”) There are still interesting points about art, grief and gender, even without the clever-clever links across time. With her format and her themes Smith questions accepted binaries. But had the story opened with the other Part 1, I may never have gotten anywhere at all with this prize winner (2014 Costa, Goldsmith’s, Saltire and Women’s Prizes).

In general, I find Smith’s recent work (also the Seasons quartet, for example) indulgent for the way she inserts random pop culture references as if they mean something and you’re an idiot if you find them irrelevant. Here, it’s songs like “Let’s Twist Again” and “Georgy Girl” and the 1960s photograph of Sylvie Vartan and Françoise Hardy reproduced on the cover.

One of my favourite books of all time. I have bought a hard copy as well as books for friends.

Playful and unique in structure. I have loved her previous work too.

“Imagine if someone projected films on to the side of your house. Would what those films were about affect your living space, she wondered, or your breathing, say, if they projected them on to your chest? No, of course they wouldn’t. But imagine if you made something and then you always had to be seen through what you’d made, as if the thing you’d made became you.”
This novel is composed of two loosely linked novella-length narratives. Depending on which edition you buy, you will read Eyes first or Camera first – and the order in which you read will certainly affect your enjoyment and understanding of each.
In Eyes, which I happened to read first in my edition, we meet an unnamed narrator, at first, someone who will grow up to work as a painter in during the Renaissance, Italy, mid 1460s. While in the second, Camera we meet Georgia, a teenager who has lost her mother and is coping with her grief. Her daily life is coupled with memories of a visit to Italy with her mother and young brother, where her mother took her to see paintings by an artist she admired. And here the two themes link together very loosely, and artfully. I found Eyes rather confusing at first: the ghost of the painter from the 1400s both looking down on those who observe the paintings, while narrating key moments from that life. I found Camera far more engaging – a compelling portrait of grief as experienced by a teenager in 2013. References to the meaning and making of art abound in both, and a theme of memory, which is art, in a sense, also runs through both. How to be both: there’s a double entendre to the meaning of the title – but you have to literally, read both stories to understand it. An interesting novel, but the labyrinthine paths of Eye make the “first” section rather hard to follow at times.