Companion Piece is a fitting title for Ali Smith’s12th novel, her first after the extraordinary Seasonal Quartet. It’s a book that springs from the same source as its predecessors – written and published swiftly, it is about as real-time as novels get, set in the heart of lockdown in “this land of union-jack-the-lads in the year of our lord two thousand and twenty one”. It feels as if Smith so enjoyed the breakneck speed of writing her quartet that she has produced this: a companion piece. Even the (beautiful) David Hockney cover looks like it was designed to sit on a shelf next to the Quartet.
There’s another kind of companionship going on here, too. Like How to Be Both (2014), Companion Piece is in two parts, with the longer, contemporary first section acting as a precursor to a scintillating story-within-a-story set in the time of the Black Death. The two parts of the novel reflect upon and enlarge each other, collapsing time and illustrating the way that problems we think of as being very much of our era – pandemic preparedness, gender identity, workplace equality – are rooted deeply in our collective histories.
