A review by oliviahurll
How to Be Both by Ali Smith
challenging
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
2.5
How to be both two stories and one, past and present, dead and alive. How to be both thoroughly engaging while simultaneously frustrating. ’How to be both’, by Ali Smith: an intriguing paradox of a novel.
Over two independent but linked chapters, Smith delivers to us a story of two halves. On the one hand, there is George - a sweet, smart, endearingly pedantic 16-year-old, navigating adolescence after the unexpected death of her mother. The prose here is relatively simple yet intimate; a stream of consciousness following the emotional aftermath of her passing, rich and seamlessly woven with reminiscence of time spent together - the special, the domestic, the memorable, the mundane. Through the skillful employment of flash forwards and flashbacks, we flit naturally between the past and George’s present and hardly notice. Grieving, George falls, no doubt, into a similar cognitive loop. A memory of particular personal significance to her surrounds an art trip they took to Italy on account of her mother’s fascination with a fresco by painter Francesco del Cossa. Art assumes a symbolic role of the central motif. Whether through music, film or ditching school for the National Gallery, ‘How to be Both’ says something about art’s nostalgic, distracting and optimally restorative effect on those in hardship. But perhaps what shines most on the page, separating this novel from other meditations on art, is the mode in which this comes across - through speech. The passing nuance grounded in the witty, playful dialogue between George and her mother offers stimulating insight, without taking itself too seriously.
On the other hand, or in the other order, depending on what edition you’re reading, we follow the story of Francesco del Cossa themselves; the story of whom, George notes, is otherwise elusive. And so the crossovers begin. Immediately, this chapter feels different, more experimental. It begins poetically, in free verse, to describe the scene of a boy in front of a painting which then flows into abstract prose. It emerges that we are reading from the perspective of an immortalised Francesco, sitting in an art gallery, who later delves into his memories of the past, much like before. While much of the language is acoustically marvellous, rhythmic and saturated with fast-packed similes, this seems to come at the expense of its semantic content. To animate the Renaissance artist and their internal dialogue, Smith indulges in a heightened level of language, as well as techniques such as false starts and rhetorical questions to convey a sense of bewilderment surrounding their own death. Though, arguably, the reader is supposed to share this sense to some degree, much of the time I felt I lacked the comprehension to fully engage. For me, the exposition was too vague to foster the mutual understanding between voice and reader that enabled the former chapter to exercise such agility between subjects. Unfortunately, instead of deciphering the overarching message of the chapters or fully appreciating their interconnectedness, I found myself returning too frequently to five simple questions: ‘who, what, where, when and why?’.