Pandemic life remains in Highland Book Prize finalist's story
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The fourth finalist for the Highland Book Prize and this week’s Star Read is Companion Piece by Ali Smith.
Written in 2021, the book points to a future from the worst pandemic times. Easing out of that life, it maybe even ends with a first step in the main character’s salvation.
Sandy Gray is living in her father’s home with his dog while he is sick in hospital. Out of the blue, a former vague acquaintance rings “Sand” with an immigration story that becomes Kafkaesque – and also offers a puzzle to be solved.
As the book begins, you experience a surreal world opening out, one where words take on a fascination and importance, as in many of Ali Smith’s novels.
“Everything was mulch of a mulchness to me right then. I even despised myself for that bit of wordplay, though this was uncharacteristic, since all my life I’d loved language.”
There’s a feeling of intimacy, as if the “I” is whispering all this in your ear, that the time is here and now and that mixed into the surreal, sometimes nightmarish world, there is also the reassuringly everyday.
Ever-present is the word 99 per cent likely to turn up in any review of an Ali Smith book – “playful”.
An example – the writer previously wrote four novels named after the seasons, and here writes: “... I didn’t care what season it was.”
Playful, right?
When the Highland Book Prize shortlist was announced, one of the judges, Kapka Kassabova, said of Companion Piece: “The finely cadenced prose is completely alive on the page, with themes that are subtly executed and an unforgettable story that is unlocked from the past and speaks to the present. A finely tuned mechanism of a book of virtuosic playfulness.”
Throughout this novel, freedom from lockdown is glimpsed – smelling woodsmoke in the open air; making plans with a friend; stories of all the people who sat outside a hospital unable to visit sick loved ones, the metal fence they sat on dented by their weight.
Companion Piece by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99).
The other finalists on the Highland Book Prize shortlist are:
Tony Davidson Confessions of a Highland Art Dealer (Woodwose Books, 2022);
Duncan Gillies Crann-Fige/ Fig Tree (Acair, 2022).
Wah! Things I Never Told My Mother (Sandstone Press, £9.99).
The winning title from the four HBP finalists will be announced at an online award ceremony on Tuesday, June 6. This event will include readings and discussion with all four shortlisted authors, before the winning title is revealed. One author will be awarded a £2000 prize by the Highland Society of London and will receive a writing retreat at Moniack Mhor, Scotland’s Creative Writing Centre. More and how to attend the online ceremony, details:
