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Companion Piece by Ali Smith {Reviewed by STELLA} There is only one word needed here — brilliant. Ali Smith’s latest instalment is Companion Piece. Written in the same breakneck fashion as her 'Seasons Quartet', it is set in 2021, in the time of Covid, and reaches back to grab a hand onto the scruff of a neck of a young blacksmithing girl at the time of the Black Death. Narrated by Sandy Gray, artist and wordsmith, the novel opens with a hello (a ‘hello’ which we will visit again later in the novel with an etymological dive). In typical Ali Smith style, we are thrown right into the heart of the chaos. Cerberus is there with his three heads making light of the current crisis. “Seen it all before. Let the bodies pile high, more the merrier in a country of people in mourning gas-lit by the constant pressure to act like it’s not a country in mourning.” Sand is past caring as she worries about her father in hospital and copes with lockdown. Her days are filled with looking after her father’s dog, trying to communicate with her father through the iPad, and occasionally staring up at the hospital windows with others, socially distanced, awaiting news. When a phone call from a past acquaintance comes out of the blue, a chain of events disrupts her isolation. Martina Pelf wants information and she’s decided Sand is the person who can interpret a riddle for her. “Curlew or curfew, you choose”. Held at Customs for several hours, the assistant curator Martina has been stuck in a small room with an artefact, the intricately smithed and highly decorative ‘Boothby Lock’, which she has been charged to transport back to the museum and it has ‘spoken’ to her. She wants Sand to figure out this puzzle for her. All okay, even if strange for Sand, as Martina, apart from when she attempted to get Sand to write a poetry essay for her, spent all her time ignoring her at college. All okay, until Martina’s family one by one descends on Sandy Gray’s abode, making themselves at home. Self-centred, maskless and oblivious of their upper-middle-class entitlement, they are completely unaware of their imposition. (Interestingly, invading another’s home is a factor that occurs in at least two other Smith novels: The Accidental and more obviously There But For The). This is also a parallel with another of Smith’s earlier works, How to Be Both (one of my personal favourites) with two distinct stories in time that intersect. In Companion Piece, a young woman, a girl really, surfaces in Sand’s house — homeless, hungry and filthy, needing a place to sleep and new boots. This girl has a companion — a curlew — and an odd manner. “Nails, she was saying now, and spikes and all decoratives, I’m the fellow. What needs mended here? Not counting this poor dog you’ve broken. The break’s an inner crack, yours to mend, I can’t but I’ll trade you a piece of house goods that need mending for a sleep under a roof, I’ve a tolerable hand, stew pans, lock, grate, kettle, candlestick, hinge, last a lifetime, you’ve my word, I’m good at knives, there’s many a person buried with a knife of mine for use in the next life.” So here comes our other narrator (the story within the story), a child of death from a bygone time — left in a ditch, marked with a brand, and cheated of her worth. Yet also a child of grit and insight. Ali Smith’s Companion Piece is an evocative and timely work of fiction that asks us all to consider what is important and what can we do when trust is lost. There are questions to be asked so we can embrace our future. Ali Smith with her wry and insightful wordsmithery is once again brilliant.