https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T9cTaietJVg

I’ve loved everything of Ali Smith’s I’ve read and I think this is the zaniest, the Ali Smithiest of all, especially the casual-seeming wordplay, so fresh and witty, and her spot-on social observation. 

At the heart of it is a love story of great poignancy, conducted over decades, between Elisabeth and Daniel.  A couple of generations apart in age but soulmates nonetheless, we follow their friendship backwards and forwards in time.  From their conversations and their experiences over the years spring many of the wide-ranging themes touched on in this masterpiece of lateral thinking.  

One image in particular has stayed with me, this from a conversation Elisabeth overhears.  The objects in an antique shop, piled up on shelves and floors, sit silent and still until the shop closes and darkness falls.  Then they strike up together.  'The symphony of the sold and the discarded.  The symphony of all the lives that had these things in them once.  The symphony of worth and worthlessness.  The Clarice Cliff fakes would be flutey.  The brown furniture would be bass, low.  The photographs in the old damp-stained albums would be whispery through their tracing paper.  The silver would be pure.  The wickerwork would be reedy.  The porcelains?  They’d have voices that sound like they might break any minute.  The wood things would be tenor.  Yes, but would the real things sound any different from the reproduction things?'

And this lovely thought on memory from Daniel.  'What I do when it distresses me that there’s something I can’t remember, is…….I imagine that whatever it is I’ve forgotten is folded close to me, like a sleeping bird…..Then, what I do is, I just hold it there, without holding it too tight, and I let it sleep.'

And what a revelation it was to learn for the first time of Pauline Boty’s life and work, how it was forgotten for years, her social and political message overlooked or even suppressed.  I defy anyone not to seek out images of her work online while reading her story.  I look forward to her being re-rediscovered as a result of this book.