Award-winning author Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now with a provocative novel grounded both in the contemporary era and in the uncannily familiar era of the Black Plague. Companion Piece stands apart from her ...

This is certainly a lesser work by Ali Smith, a writer for whom we at NUBClub have a lot of love. In Companion Piece, Smith examines two stories at the same time -- an artist (Sandy) dealing with an ailing father and the displaced family of a brief acquaintance from college during COVID and a young woman apprenticed as a blacksmith hundreds of years earlier. The work is clearly an impressionistic meditation on the social controls and bizarreness of times of plagues and how women are treated in these times. While one of us didn't connect with the writing at all (and thus hated the book), most of us thought the descriptions of COVID induced isolation and fear were strikingly rendered, and Smith masterfully ruminates on a few complex images that represent the ambiguity of the times -- a lock that's shaped to look natural, a dense poem with multiple meanings, the slippage between the words curlew and curfew and the deconstruction of their meanings. The issue is that while both stories are clearly connected thematically, Smith kind of waves her hands over the connections between the two characters in terms of plot. There is a moment where the stories collide that isn't really explained and doesn't make sense. It seems clear that Smith is not really that interested in making the story tie to together logically. That was the crux of the disagreement about the book. For some of us, the fact that Smith would create a time-travelling scene and then not give an explanation was a blow to consistency that shattered the story; for others, we recognized that Smith wasn't trying to tell a plot-focused story and could ignore the unexplained elements. Interesting, the majority of us had the same opinion about everything else, liking the style and the scenes, disliking the vagueness of the world laws and plot. Opinions differed based on how much the story consistency mattered to your evaluation of the whole. In short, your mileage is going to vary here based on how much tightness of explanations matters to you. Regardless, if you like Smith's writing, this is a good, not great, addition to her canon.