2023/139: Companion Piece — Ali Smith

2023/139: Companion Piece — Ali Smith

... no government was ever going to give a fuck about and no history was ever going to think it worth recording never mind bowing its head even momentarily to the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives, who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.[p. 32]

The majority of Companion Piece takes place in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. Sandy Gray is a middle-aged female artist who works by layering painted words, one atop the other. Her father is in hospital and she can't visit as much as she'd like, due to Covid restrictions. Instead she looks after his dog and his house, and waits for the phone to ring with news. The call that kicks off the story, though, is not from the hospital but from a university classmate who Sandy once helped analyse a poem. The classmate, Martina Pelf (nee Inglis), has had a strange experience when returning to the UK with a medieval artifact: "The passports. The blank officials. The inexplicable and uncalled-for detainment. The revelation of the artisan beauty. The disembodied voice in the locked room." The voice said 'curlew or curfew, you choose'.

( Read more... )