Author Ali Smith was this year’s Golding Speaker at the first large event of Marlborough LitFest 2022 on Friday September 30. Speaking to a packed Town Hall audience, she talked about her multi-award winning seasonal quartet of Autumn, Winter, Spring and Summer and more particularly about her latest novel, Companion Piece, which complements and arises from the other four books.
The books were written between 2016 and 2020 in as close to real time as possible and reflect the turbulent times we find ourselves in. Smith commented, “We’d had progress, stability for a long time and in those four years, starting with Brexit, political, financial and international stability started to fall apart.”
In these turbulent times Smith turns to narrative, “Not many ends tie up and in most lives things are disparate and we hold them together with narrative. In times when things felt so disparate and chaotic I was reminded that story is always human and opens as soon as you speak to someone.”
Companion Piece is, she says, “a book about people who don’t like each other very much and who get together to solve a mystery and don’t.” Puzzled ? The book has many strands. Set against the background of Covid, lockdown and the global pandemic there are folkloric elements and links with a medieval artefact and the medieval pandemic of the Black Death which saw the destruction of work forces. Smith explores the way blacksmiths during the Black Death were asked to brand people with a V and extends this to the idea of branding in today’s society.
It’s a book about isolation and how we can break isolation, about the concept of hospitality and bringing a stranger into your home, about the responsibilities of storytellers. Most of all it’s a book about words, about meaning and how we ascribe meaning. Smith explores the word ‘hello’ with its deep roots and uses. At the heart of the book is the riddle “Curlew or Curfew, you choose.”
Curlews says Smith, “are the wildest of birds and representative of what we can’t tame. They appear in the early Anglo-Saxon poem, ‘The Seafarer’ and are seen as a holy bird, a pilgrim bird. They are now under immense pressure as a species.”
Despite the human race being under immense pressure Smith left the audience with an optimistic message. Celebrating the multiplicity of language, the power of story to make things open and not exclude, she left the audience with a final message – “We will endure, human beings are brilliant as a species.”
September weather: moving back towards normal
