lokroma reviewed Companion Piece by Ali Smith
Review of 'Companion Piece' on 'Goodreads'
4 stars
A complicated, during/post Covid book. I get the 30,000 foot, this is a book about companionship, but I had a tough time parsing the details, in particular the story near the end about the female smithy during the plague in England in the Middle Ages. She is persecuted because she is a woman in a man's trade, forced out of her work, and branded with a "V" for vagabond and vagrant. She travels away from her tormentors, but we don't learn what happens to her or to the curlew that rides on her shoulder. Smith poses the questions to us: "What happens next? Does she go and follow the players?...Does the bird still follow her at the safe distance...? Does she leave the peopled world...?" The answers are left to the reader to formulate. Perhaps she is asking what any of us do after surviving a long period of isolation …
A complicated, during/post Covid book. I get the 30,000 foot, this is a book about companionship, but I had a tough time parsing the details, in particular the story near the end about the female smithy during the plague in England in the Middle Ages. She is persecuted because she is a woman in a man's trade, forced out of her work, and branded with a "V" for vagabond and vagrant. She travels away from her tormentors, but we don't learn what happens to her or to the curlew that rides on her shoulder. Smith poses the questions to us: "What happens next? Does she go and follow the players?...Does the bird still follow her at the safe distance...? Does she leave the peopled world...?" The answers are left to the reader to formulate. Perhaps she is asking what any of us do after surviving a long period of isolation like a pandemic.
The curlew is a symbol of death and resurrection and the tale of the smithy perhaps is a metaphor for the narrator navigating her way through the difficulties of caring for a hospitalized dad (heart condition) during the Covid epidemic. But there are lots of little details that I couldn't puzzle out.
The book is filled with pairings. In the Curlew section, the chapters start with contrast phrases like "Goodbye v. hello...Imagination v. reality...Real v. fake...Alive v. dead." The content of the chapters is the ongoing story of the narrator's reconnection with an old school friend and her narcissistic twin daughters (more pairings). I couldn't always make the connection between the chapter's title and its content.
This was the most difficult of Smith's books for me. Although it has the trademark warm humanity and playfulness intertwined with connection to troubling events in the real world of her previous work, a lot escaped me. So I'm going for a re-read.
