... superb ... a lock, crafted by a smith, that is, by A. Smith, demanding in the engagement it requires, and rewarding of that engagement, as one picks away at the words she has used to build it ... one of the breathtakingly radical passages that flash so brightly in this radical book.
It is remarkable to be alive at the same time as Scottish writer Ali Smith. No one else, I would argue, captures our ongoing contemporary nightmare in a manner that is both expansively imaginative and the perfect mirror of its abrupt absurdity ... Smith’s books often force one to think along such streams of consciousness before breaking the wave with a swell of emotion. Leaping from deep investigations of words and ideas to cultural references as lofty as Keats and as basic as Paul McCartney’s Wings, Smith is intellectually rigorous yet democratic, warm and — crucially — playful ... recognizing the capacity of any person or thing to become one’s companion, she draws from her well of wit and empathy to assemble a novel both enigmatic and inviting, begging to be read and reread ... With its sweeping and incisive vision, its proof that you can trap lightning in a bottle, Companion Piece shares the best qualities with the quartet to which it plays companion, offering a clever, erudite and humane portrait of our intense contemporary moment. Leaping from mythology to etymology, history to literature, she also makes the granular elements of daily movement the stuff of life-sustaining art. She shows, again, what exceptional fiction can do in troubled times that nothing else can.
In her latest novel, wordsmith nonpareil Ali Smith once again shows herself to be a master of forging inventive connections. Companion Piece helps us see our world in a different light by finding points of contact between two plagues and two female artists, five centuries apart ... ver intent on expanding our understanding of others and the world we share, Smith's work is brainy and moving, thoughtful and playful — and never irrelevant ... is, among other things, a passionate paean to books ... One of Smith's great gifts as a writer is verbal playfulness — a joy of lex — even in dark times ... By exploring binaries such as imagination versus reality, surface versus depth, real versus fake, and stories versus lies — with their often blurred boundaries — Companion Piece challenges readers to embrace the indeterminate. Smith, on fire, welds so many elements into this short novel — including Sandy's dreams and childhood memories and the terrible ordeals of a talented, steely 16th century waif — that the result is as intricate as that artisanal lock.
Smith feels the deep undertow of history beneath the superficial eddies of the current ... Sand is quite like Ali Smith. She has a way with words. She is gay. She is creative and cussed and seldom says what you expect her to say. But there’s not a shred in this book of the fashionable solipsism of autofiction: Smith is too receptive to the world’s variety for that. Lyrical visions alternate with end-of-pier farce and then with exasperated commentary from the narrator about the incongruity between the two. Shakespearean echoes sound through the book. Fables enrich it; fables about fathers and daughters, about interchangeable siblings, about magic beasts and sexual indeterminacy ... shapely, but not conclusive. It doesn’t feel like a coda to the Four Seasons tetralogy, rather an addition to a book sequence for all seasons, with no end in sight. Smith could carry on adding to the writerly collage she is creating through many more volumes. I hope she does.
The two parts of the novel reflect upon and enlarge each other, collapsing time and illustrating the way that problems we think of as being very much of our era – pandemic preparedness, gender identity, workplace equality – are rooted deeply in our collective histories ... The reader is left with many questions at the end, but that feels like one of the points of the book. Companion Piece, like life, is messy, funny, sad, beautiful and mysterious.
... the plot is filigreed with individual and collective stories, each a nugget that, in Smith’s world, is as precious as gold ... Not that these, or the novel itself, are conventional plots, with a beginning, middle and end. As in almost all her previous work Smith tinkers with time, bringing the past into the present, as if that’s where it belongs, and leaving us guessing the outcome for her characters ... So peculiar, so Ali Smith, you might say. And if, like me, this is the sort of thing you like, then Companion Piece will be a treat. Not that it is unalloyed pleasure. Much of it is a state-of-the-nation commentary, tugging the imagination, conscience and heartstrings. With every book, Smith’s voice grows more beguiling and powerful. Underpinned by rage, bemusement and humour, her stories take on the world from unexpected angles. In so doing they offer startling illumination ... Although it is a gimlet-eyed record of our times, Companion Piece is no dirge. Smith’s talent is to infuse dread and despair with visions of better days, and possibilities of positive change. At its core is the worth and fragility of every living thing.
Smith is not didactic but she is most certainly polemical ... It wouldn’t be an Ali Smith novel without linguistic fireworks; increasingly nor would it be one without a sense of moral indignation. Companion Piece is, to use the Smith cliché lexicon, 'characteristically unclassifiable', 'predictably unpredictable' and “as freewheeling as a rollercoaster'. She is in grave peril of becoming a national treasure. My only 'orry was that this style is getting too easy for her. Perhaps the next book will be a surprising surprise.
In her 2012 book Artful, Smith reflects that ‘books need time to dawn on us’, for us to ‘understand what makes them, structurally, in thematic resonance, in afterthought’. There are few writers whose work exemplifies this more acutely than Smith herself. Companion Piece is no exception, suffused as it is with motifs that subtly shift and gather weight as the book unfolds. With its playful sense of language’s possibilities and its experimental edge, this new novel explores the potentially transformative power that connection can hold. And while it may not reach the heights of Smith’s best work, to read (and re-read) Companion Piece is to be enlivened along with its protagonist.
It’s hard to imagine anyone but Smith pulling off such an unorthodox approach. Not everything feels plausible, yet everything makes a certain sense or symmetry. It’s both hyper-real and surreal. And if there is a hallucinatory quality to the work (Sandy, at one point, wonders if everything, including the government, is a hallucination caused by the virus), it may be because life feels that way, too ... Across the whole quartet, and in this new Companion Piece, Smith digs through language and finds real life.
This is a book about isolation, detainment and waiting, as well as letting people in, in every sense. These are difficult subjects to weave suspensefully into a narrative, though they chime companionably with the motifs of barriers, internment and borders that are threaded through the Seasonal quartet ... It is not always clear that Smith knows where she is going with these strands; and at times one wonders how they fit together, and what it all means...Certainly, the combination of whimsy and weird precision accurately captures dream logic ... Despite these frustrations, we find ourselves still wanting to solve the riddle in this reinvention of the locked-room mystery. Smith offers no easy solutions, but the notion of the importance of company and companionship, learned through lockdown, and of opening up to others, feels 'key'. Here, as elsewhere in the author’s oeuvre, her characters can feel like vehicles for theme and dialogue, but there is also a peculiar intensity to Companion Piece, especially in the portrait of Sandy’s father (something of a locked room himself), which strikes deeper notes alongside those of sadness, anger and grief in this impressionistic account of Britain during Covid.
It can be hard to keep up, but rest assured that Smith is a trustworthy, if mischievous guide ... This seems one plot device too many, although the pair fulfil the younger generational role ... The danger with a topical work such as this — written throughout a second gruelling year of pandemic — is that by the time of publication it has to some extent been hijacked by an onslaught of current affairs...Yet the implicit and explicit messages Smith is delivering through Companion Piece, as with the Seasonal Quartet, are that interconnectedness and community can triumph over disaffection and disconnection. Those are themes that do not date; a reminder in perilous times of the need for Smith’s wise, humane and generous voice — and the angry consolation her work provides.
Smith artfully crafts another pandemic piece .... Smith’s allusive style of writing extends to other methods of hermeneutics, some questioning the very production of meaning-making ... In moments, Companion Piece, can come across as a little consumed by itself in that very assured (post-post) modernist way. It goes around in circles of self-referentiality and ends with a platitudinal hope—almost as a nod to its own hopeless search for meaning. But, as Sandy says, even a belief can be a companionable thing. Companions, for better or worse, is just something you trust.
... strangely reassuring, as if Smith is reminding us that times have always been tough, and that people have always found ways to make beautiful things anyway ... My only quibble with the book is that it feels unfinished; something in the relationship between Sandy and Martina Inglis remains unresolved, though this may well be by design ... does feel like a companion to Smith’s other work—not a groundbreaking departure but a very pleasant and often humorous complement to her other work. Smith herself remains a very fine wordsmith indeed.
Meaning is meted out in small parcels that only make sense when you look at them backwards ... It is only with hindsight that you can understand the significance of many parts of the novel — and for those parts that still seem unconnected, you’ll want to start at the beginning again to see what you missed ... Sometimes the tangents went on too long, the dialogue was confusing and the timeline lost me. Sometimes the parts that mentioned the COVID-19 pandemic were a little too on-the-nose ... Overall, though, these pitfalls are overshadowed by an intriguing form, compelling language and interesting premise.
I enjoy the rhythms of Smith’s long sentences but there is sometimes a sense that she is coasting as a stylist. She uses repetition to such an extent that it can feel like an effect instead of an experiment ... Even so, Smith’s prose can still be enthralling ... The book’s political commitment has undeniable power, with its anger at sexual violence and the indirect violence of poverty and exploitation. But this is a confusing novel about confusing times. At one point, Sandy says she is 'beyond caring' about the state of the world, even though it is obvious that she cares deeply. Readers will recognise this paradoxical feeling but they may also find that, as well as being exhausting to experience, it is baffling and gruelling to read about ... merely reflects our current malaise, it doesn’t subvert it. It is a symptom of the time that never quite becomes the profound reckoning it wants to be.
... shares thematic and stylistic similarities with its four immediate predecessors, but it’s also a refreshingly original addition to her impressive and hard-to-pigeonhole body of work ... By this point in the novel, readers unfamiliar with Smith’s style or who lack a taste for the surreal may be growing a bit uneasy. But in its final quarter, Smith, who is expert at defying readers’ expectations, makes a radical turn, transporting them back several centuries to the time of an earlier plague in England to tell the story of a woman who bears a striking resemblance to the intruder of Sandy’s tale ... Companion Piece’s elliptical, episodic structure won’t necessarily suit everyone’s taste, but those who share Smith’s concerns and appreciate her distinctive approach to fiction will be happy to find themselves again in her company.
... dialogue-driven, deeply imagined, hilarious, and affecting tale of unexpected companionship during a plague ... Smith follows her award-winning Seasonal Quartet with a bristling yet tender, richly layered, brilliant, and dynamic novel of connections forged and love affirmed.
... touching ... The Scottish author’s 12th novel displays once again her ingenuity in pulling together disparate narrative strands ... With art and humor, Ali is the smith who forges links for her idiosyncratic narrative, one of which is the value of acts of kindness amid distress ... A truly marvelous tale of pandemic and puns and endurance.
... expansive and tantalizing ... As ever, Smith’s flawless stream-of-conscious narration is at once accessible and transforming, and with it she manages to contain eye-blinking hallucinatory images, such as a shattered clock that reconstitutes itself. This is a captivating Rubik’s cube of fiction.
