Book of the Week

How to be both by Ali Smith

Recommended by Mrs Waller

 

This is a Marmite book: three quarters of its reviews are 5-star or 1-star. The former think Smith’s a genius; the latter are irritated and frustrated by unpunctuated sentences and ‘unnecessary artificial effects’. I usually swap books with my mother and sister, but they both physically recoiled when I mentioned this one, which only made me more curious. I liked it straight away, from the opening in which the first narrator in my edition plays with time, before and after her mother’s death. 

 

How to be both has a bizarrely sassy blurb that doesn’t suit it: ‘A renaissance artist of the 1460s. A child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.’ What I enjoyed was that Smith conveys internal voices of the bereaved more authentically than most novels, capturing the experience of dissociation, of thinking as a distraction from feeling, of living in a contingent, semi-present way after a trauma. 

 

 

The blurb didn’t draw me, but I confess I’ve always been a sucker for a marketing gimmick - as a kid, I’d get to the record shop earlier if there were different colours of cover art or vinyl to choose from for records I ‘needed’ to buy - so it’s no surprise that I was intrigued when Smith had her publishers print two versions of this book. One version had the story set in modern day first and one had it second. I’m lucky that I bought the version I did, because most people seem to agree that the book is more accessible if you start with ‘Camera’ (21st century), which is more similar to her other novels, not ‘Eyes’ (15th century). The edition I read opens with a pedantic 16-year-old teenager called George (Georgia), who is grieving the recent death of her mother, and recounting a conversation with her. 

 

The narrator is interested in words: the lyrics of old pop songs; etymology; the feared words ‘Lockjaw. Quicksand. Polio. Lung’; the loved words ‘gauche’, ‘usquequaque’; the number of stages of grief - ‘There are three, or five, or some people say seven’ but it doesn't matter, ‘because nothing will ever not be like this again’. She is pedantically concerned with tense, partly because she is grieving, so very aware of concepts of ‘before’ and ‘after’, but also ‘because if things really did happen simultaneously, it’d be like reading a book but one in which all the lines of the text have been overprinted, like each page is actually two pages but with one superimposed on the other to make it unreadable.’ The richness of the language is a white noise through which we hear her grieving. 

 

I share more of Ali Smith’s reference points, so probably get more of her jokes than current pupils would, because I‘m closer in age, but I’d give her a try if I were you. If you want a less weird entry point, try The Accidental, which I’ve just reread and loved all over again - a story about a family staying in a holiday home, when a strange person comes and alters the course of each of their lives.