By Aneeqa Mazhar Wattoo

“I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free,” the 18th-century sculptor Michelangelo wrote in a letter to his friend, the Italian poet Benedetto Varchi. In her audaciously inventive novel, How to be Both, Scottish writer Ali Smith, does, I think, the same. Written with a fine sense of boldness in a sardonic tone that often masks unexpected poignancy, How to be Both recounts the stories of two women in two different eras. The first half of the novel is about George, a highly intelligent and imaginative teenage girl living in Cambridge with her father and younger brother, mourning in an intriguing variety of ways the recent death of her journalist/thinker/activist mother. In the second part of the novel, Smith veers back to the 14th century, recounting the story of Francesco del Cossa, a female artist who worked all her life disguised as a man, and whose work inexplicably and obsessively George’s mother is drawn to during the last few weeks before her death.

Smith’s account of George’s days of mourning is striking because of the way she draws an explicit distinction between George’s two selves: “George now” and “George from before her mother died”. Using simple but beautifully constructed sentences that challenge the linearity of time we assume in everyday life, Smith seamlessly combines present and past: “Okay, I’m imagining, George in the passenger seat last May in Italy says at exactly the same time as George at home in England the following January stares at the meaninglessness of the words of an old song.” At school, George has regular meetings with a counsellor who is ostensibly guiding her on how to deal better with her mother’s loss (and who George casually asks deeply intuitive philosophical questions — “when we die, do you think we still have memories?” — often surprising her into silence).

But at no moment is that all that is happening between them. Just as at no moment is the novel only one thing: allegory or historical fact, present or past, imagination or temporal reality. With its subtle questioning of the unspoken rules we assume about time and memory, a larger question about the possibility of an all-pervasive, perpetual duality in life grows out of the novel’s structure: Can two times occur simultaneously? Can one person be both; man and woman, happy and unhappy, fearful and secure, here and somewhere else, at the same time? Part of Smith’s answer to this question lies in the novel’s evocation and depiction of art as a means to not only voice such a range of difficult questions but also reveal the complexity of answering them in any simplistic or definitive way.

Art dominates the novel; it is prevalent in the thoughts of its protagonists, we see it in the physical spaces they inhabit — the art gallery in Italy George’s mother repeatedly visits and George’s own room with its disintegrating wall that she camouflages with a collage of photographs — and in the conversations characters have with each other. At the centre of the novel is a debate about art itself; art and all it can say. And perhaps more importantly, what it does not, or chooses not, to say. Yet, Smith shows the relationship between a human being and art (as artist or audience and as spectator or muse) in all its turbulent glory and agony. George’s mother, for instance, cleverly writes in one of her famous Subverts (an online movement she has pioneered): “art makes nothing happen in a way that makes something happen”. And yet, in another part of the novel, Smith writes: “George is tired of art. She is fed up of its always knowing best.”

And it does know best, the novel seems to be quietly convincing the reader in its marvellously lyrical way. It knows what the reader does not know, and more so, what the reader can never find out. For there are secrets the novel refuses to disclose, even at the end. The 19th-century fresco paintings that George’s mother is fixated with, for example, are by an artist there is very little remaining information about. The consistent dearth of knowledge about him despite her mother’s and later, George’s best efforts to find out more — questions such as what kind of life he lived, did he have a family — span a larger concern in the novel about narratives and secrecy. How do we construct narratives about people we know, and even about ourselves? And to what degree is our knowledge forever subjected, and subordinated, to a natural instinct for selectivity? How much of what we are, the novel compels one to wonder, remains a secret all your life, not only to others around you, but even to yourself?

Though the novel offers no easy, reassuring answers to such questions, some degree of clarity is achieved in its second part where Smith, with a great deal of verve, invents the narrative of Cossa, the mysterious, obscure artist who is recurrently mentioned in the first part. This section of the novel reminds the reader strongly of Virginia Woolf’s classic, Orlando, with its androgynous hero whom the book is named after. Smith’s account of Cossa is rendered in a distinctly Woolfian, stream-of-consciousness style. Yet the more obvious likeness is the sexual ambiguity regarding the gender of her protagonist — in much of the second part of the novel, the reader finds herself uncertain about whether she is thinking of Cossa as a man or a woman. This confusion occurs rather naturally, almost unconsciously; such is Smith’s talent. The reader almost forgets to be disturbed by the lack of clarity, much less question its source. Instead, there is a celebration of the general multiplicity of identity in this part of the novel that allows the reader to accept Cossa as being more than one self. As Cossa thinks at one point, reminiscing about his youth: “Long gone, the picture, I expect/Long gone the life I, the boy and the man I, the sleek good sweet-eyed horse Mattone I, the blushing girl I.”

How to be Both, through the rich multiplicity of its narratives and the diversity of its sources — it draws from Greek literature, Italian Renaissance art, and scenes from ordinary life in 21st century Cambridge, England — is a giant of a book. Smith’s genius comes across in various ways: the book is at some level an elaborate commentary on art through art itself (at several points, the narrative veers off without warning, into disconcerting verse); on another, a glimpse of the life of an artist in an otherwise unimaginable time. Yet, it is also a moving account of the shared human experience of grief. But most ambitiously, the novel attempts an unspoken conversation between two women, each elusively enigmatic, from two different centuries. Read this book if you are willing to be challenged and comforted at the same time. It is that rare, rare thing that Smith describes a particular 14th-century fresco painting as “a friendly work of art”.

How to be Both

(NOVEL)

By Ali Smith

Hamish Hamilton, UK

ISBN 978-0241145210

384pp.