Ali Smith’s prose is wrought with so much dreaming, it positively sings with disarming, meticulous joy. In turn her reader is transformed, utterly, in expectation. In her latest novel ‘How to be both’, all of her tender, clever energies find explication. A delightful overlapping and juxtaposition of time provides the central theme upon which characters flower through death in verse or apparitions erupt through Venetian art gallery floors mid-afternoon. This novel, divided into two parts, dispenses with chronology altogether as the second part can be read first without altering the narrative. The author is inviting the reader to re-calibrate their notions of acceptable form and to re-envision their notions of time as discipliner, as an impinging force, as dictator. Further on in the text, Smith challenges us to reconsider our notions of acceptability altogether, whether in terms of gender, of the spirit after death, or the nature of death, altogether.
Time, Smith seems to say, is more fluid than staunchly rooted. The latter has a mystic’s grasp of oblivion and memory and apprehends time as primarily a coil of narrative, voices, craft and yes yearning. Fittingly, a character beset with loss and curiosity provides the voice for the first part of the novel, in the shape of George, a determinedly original British teenager, who has recently lost her mother. In the presence of her mother’s memory George feels a cognizance more alive than divisible. She feels the wry stability of her activist/journalist mother ceaselessly drawing her out of bereavement to laughter, art and to the humility of life itself. At one point George recalls a conversation where her mother pokes fun at her for being connected to far too many technological devices simultaneously, ‘You, her mother says watching her, are a migrant of your own existence. I am not George says. You are, her mother says. What’s your problem dinosaur? George says. Her mother laughs. Same problem as yours, she says. We’re all migrants of our own existence now. In this bit of the world at least. So we better get ready. Because look at how migrants get treated all over the world’. George’s mother wishes her daughter to live life all senses blazing, she wishes her daughter to experience the entire gamut, to accomplish an existence resplendent with story and colour.
In art, both allegorical and conceptual, Smith mines the spells of life. Her powers of description to this effect are excellently executed, both radiant and transposed with glee. At one point in the novel, George and her mother visit a gallery , and the latter in musing on a painting sums up the absurd interconnectivity of the painting in relation to earthly existence itself ; ‘It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind and behind that and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective for miles’ Art is synonymous with wonder, Smith seems to stress. In cheery puzzlement, there is astonishing life. In gazing upon the paintings her mother adored, George learns to wonder at what has remained. Smith confirms to the reader that wonder, even consciously evoked, might well be a consolation for death; where the imagination might sway into darkness upon the body expiring, wonder might yet bring the soul to a kind of speech. The author lovingly imposes on us soft bafflements; is death the end to all the wonderful things or is it a precursor to pure imagination? In continuing to speak to her mother beyond the divide, George breathes alongside death but loves the dead into a kind of illuminated re-awakening. Another displacement of linearity occurs with the portrayal of the life of her mother’s favourite artist, Francesco del Cossa in the second half of the novel. Francesco’s spirit is resurrected while George is gazing at one of her murals and thus is rendered as another totem of mortality or the absence of such, to consider.
The character of Francesco del Cossa is a fifteenth century painter forced to disguise herself as a boy to gain apprenticeship to a renowned artist or to suffer life in a nunnery. Smith introduces her character to us in a whirling gust of verse ‘blue sky the white drift/the blue through it/rising to darker blue/start with green-blue underpaint add indigo under lazurite mix/ in lead white or ashes glaze/ with lapis same old sky? earth? again?/ home again home again/ jiggity down through the up/’
This playful arrival, on a cloud of colour, is a lovely prelude to a narrative on the life of an artist. Through the figure of Del Cossa, Smith divulges serious lessons on what it means to fully delve into a creative work. We see Del Cossa ruminating; ‘It is a feeling thing, to be a painter of things: cause everything, even an imagined or gone thing or creature or person has essence: paint a rose or a coin or a duck or a brick, and you’ll feel it as sure as if a coin had had a mouth and told you what it was like to be a coin, as if a rose told you first-hand why petals are, their softness and wetness held in a pellicle of colour thinner and more feeling than an eyelid, as if a duck told you about the combined wet and under dry of its feathers, a brick about the rough kiss of its skin’
Smith’s message is clear; in order to perceive a work of art properly you must also allow for infinitude. Smith enumerates for us what it means to stand in front of an exuberance of proportion and beauty. For this author, even in looking at an object you must suffer or entangle yourself with the soul of an artist. There are preambles to seeing she seems to say; there is firstly the recognition of the meagreness of skill or perception with which we must gaze. With the provision of context we are better able to partake in the history, the times in which the painter breathed. But to achieve timelessness the work must hook us to despair, hope fear, disbelief or even a kind of piety. In doing so the painting is no longer shackled to the concerns of its creator but is freed, free to provoke or transgress into obsession. Free to unite with memory and into the skin of consciousness. In this way time is rendered irrelevant to both the painter and the audience. Here, time is irrelevant to the novelist and her words are richer for it. Smith’s message is both architectural and luminous; only by embracing that stunning doubt, of which our spirits are crafted, will we truly be found.
How to be Both
Author: Ali Smith
Publisher: Hamish Hamilton, UK
Pages: 384; Price: £12.79 (Hardcover)
