One of my little projects towards the end of 2023 was to read and review Scottish writer Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, a series of four books featuring slices of life from post-Brexit Britain. It was a both entertaining and thought-provoking examination of a country that’s lost its way, but as it turns out, that wasn’t quite the end of the story, with Smith tempted to come back one last time. This latest work doesn’t feature any of the protagonists (as far as I’m aware…) of the series, though, so how do we know it belongs there?
Easy – you just need to look at the cover…
*****
Companion piece is a short novel introducing us to Sandy, a painter, whose father has ended up in hospital after a heart attack. She’s left looking after his dog and unable to visit owing to the strict COVID restrictions in place, which means she’s sitting at home, waiting for the nurses to call with updates on her father’s health.
It’s another call that interrupts the silence, however, coming from an unexpected quarter. Martina Pelf, née Inglis, is a fleeting acquaintance from Sandy’s uni days decades ago, and after a bad experience at an airport, she needs to get something off her chest. Unexpectedly, Sandy turns out to be the right person to call, even if the decision is to have unforeseen consequences. One thing leads to another until Martina’s family end up paying a visit – and they’re *not* happy…
One of the hallmarks of the Seasonal Quartet was the way chance interactions can change your life, and that’s certainly the case in Companion piece. Sandy is very much a loner, content to work on her paintings in her shed, visual representations of poems with words slathered across the canvas. Now she’s suddenly forced to interact with a group of total strangers, with her life, and her home, almost literally invaded. In a time when many are forced to spend their days alone, she’s been given a new set of companions, whether she likes it or not.
Once again, Smith is writing to comment on the state of the nation, and a right state it’s in. The first part touches again on COVID, and the effect it has had on the already ragged NHS:
Death in reverse:
they eventually wheel my father off the corridor and into a side room. It says STOREROOM on the door and it still is a storeroom but now it’s also full of machines under its shelves of things and my father hooked up to the machines.
What I can see of the junior medic’s face is grey with tiredness and yet she’s still kind, takes her time with me, stands away from me but with me, at the entrance to the ward beyond which I can see my father in the bed through the door of the old storeroom, I can see the angle of his head, I can see the oxygen thing over his face.
p.52 (Hamish Hamilton, 2022)
There follow a series of jabs at politicians more concerned with point-scoring than actually doing something to help people, the writer clearly differentiating between Westminster bluster and the exhaustion of the medical staff on the front line.
Yes, these are different times, and Sandy suddenly finds herself confronted by them. Much of this comes in the form of Martina’s twins, two daughters (one non-binary), landing on her doorstep and attacking her with waves of text talk. The pair are slightly unaware of personal boundaries, but surprisingly quick to take offence at any perceived encroachment on their own rights.
In fact, one of the major themes of the book concerns people who lash out because they feel threatened. The story of the twins, afraid of how a couple of conversations with Sandy seem to have changed their mother’s behaviour drastically, is just one of many. We hear of people raging against those who dare to wear masks as they ‘make them feel uncomfortable’, and one of the more bewildering confrontations involves a couple of strangers who begin shouting at Sandy in her own home:
I realized after a minute they were yelling at my front room window. At me. So I opened the window. I asked them what the matter was. The woman told me my front room had made her feel really angry. Then the man said I was lazy. I had no idea what they were talking about. Then I realized they were angry at my books. (p.125)
At which point I felt rather seen…
Companion piece features all the usual wordplay, literary references and hidden connections I’d come to expect from the series, but one thing that is different is the direction the story takes. Around three-quarters of the way through the book, we’re suddenly shifted several hundred years back in time with the appearance of a new protagonist and a new story, connected to a visitor Sandy mentions in a conversation with Martina. We’re shown another time of plague, and another set of rules meant to keep people in their place. The star of the show here is a young woman trying to make her way through life with just a bird as a companion, and the occasional kindness of strangers to rely on.
It’s an excellent story, but if I’m honest, it feels a little off after having spent most of the book with Sandy. While we do return briefly to the twenty-first century, this story within a story has the effect of breaking the spell, leaving the reader slightly bemused. Yes, the connections are there, bringing us right back to Martina’s initial phone call, but by this time I, at least, would prefer to have stayed with the main story.
It’s perhaps not the best way to round off the series, then, but Companion piece is still an enjoyable read, another look at how the current political generation, unable to cope with a series of natural and man-made disasters, has made life worse for the people they’re supposed to be helping. Of course, it’s also about how change, and making new friends, can be for the best, even if we’d rather have everything stay the same. You see, in periods like these, that’s just not possible – but letting new companions into your life might just help you through the dark, dismal times…
