Ah, Ali Smith and How to be both; how to be both of what? You see, everything is connected and entwined, like the double-helix of DNA, like a snail's shell, like the past and the present, and hey, let's twist again like we did last summer, where the boys turned out to be girls and the girls had boys' names and it didn't matter anyway because the girls preferred the other girls.
How to be both is split into two sections: one called "Camera" and one called "Eyes", both identified as "Part One", and as it doesn't matter which order you read them in, the physical copies of the book are sold, randomly, both ways, and the ebook includes both formats. My copy started with Camera -- in which a young girl, George, is mourning the death of her mother, finding salvation through the friendship of her new pal H, and trying to reconnect with her mother through remembering a trip they had taken to Italy the previous summer to view a remarkable fresco painting. In Eyes, the life story of the 15th century fresco's painter is imagined as the spirit of Francesco del Cossa is summoned by George's interest (and to muddy the waters further, this section might simply be a school project on Empathy/Sympathy produced by George and H).
This book is a hall of mirrors, but no funhouse. There is constant wordplay and timeshifts and meditations on the natures of narrative and history and art (with gender and the oppression of women never far from the surface). The following passage (in which George contemplates a picture she took of a double-helix statue) summarises this book as well as anything:
It resembled a joyful bedspring or a bespoke ladder. It was like a kind of shout, if a shout to the sky could be said to look like something. It looked like the opposite of history, though they were always going on at school about how DNA history had been made here in this city.How to be both is a bit of a slog -- it doesn't seem meant to be friendly to the reader -- but with a large font and wide margins, at least it's not as long as it looks. It is as well-constructed as a fine brick wall and as artful as an iconography-rich Renaissance portrait; with much to say about who witnesses and how we witness and how we can subvert the messages that those in power would like to preserve -- it's not that I didn't understand this book, but it's all construction, all clever-clever, and like all the other books on this year's Man Booker Prize shortlist that I've read so far, seems more steak than sizzle (and if a writer wants me to care about her characters, I need some sizzle). To bolster myself, I'm adding this opinion from The Guardian:
What if history, instead, was that shout, that upward spring, that staircase ladder-thing, and everybody was just used to calling something quite different history? What if received notions of history were deceptive?
Deceived notions. Ha.
Maybe anything that forced or pushed such a spring back down or blocked the upward shout of it was opposed to the making of what history really was.
The Francesco passages are littered with poetic fragments that pull the chronology forward and back and so out-of-shape that sometimes, it is difficult to know what is happening. But sentences like: "down to/that thin-looking line/made of nothing/ground and grit and the/gather of dirt and earth and/the grains of stone…" are undeniably beautiful, so does it matter if you can't work out what's happening?Having said all that, I do recognise what Smith accomplished here and my four stars are to recognise what she created, not my reading pleasure.
Personally, I preferred George's narrative and could have happily read an entire novel which consisted of a more conventional plotting of her story. I admired the Francesco passages rather than feeling engrossed by them and occasionally it felt as if Smith's ideas were so clever they were in danger of getting in the way of the story.
Man Booker Prize Shortlist 2014, with my ranking:
The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan
The Lives of Others by Neel Mukherjee
To Rise Again At a Decent Hour by Joshua Ferris
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler
All I can say so far is that The Narrow Road to the Deep North is my favourite book on the shortlist, but this one, How to be both, has prize-winner written all over it. Sigh. It's unlikely that I will be able to read J (which has yet to be released) before the winner is announced, so this mad dash to consume the list beforehand might be pointless -- made further pointless by my lack of reading enjoyment; I may need to find a new favourite literary prize.
