‘Ho this is a mighty twisting thing’. So begins half of Ali Smith’s How to be Both and a ‘mighty twisted thing’ it is indeed, a book that itself excels in the art of being ‘both’. The novel maintains two states of existence; divided into two halves from very different historical periods. Produced in two versions, Smith varies the order in which the two halves are consumed by her readers, physically exploring concerns with appearances and the things that lie beneath them, of being and of not being.
One narrative begins with the troubles of the renaissance painter Francesco de Cossa, revealed here as a girl in disguise, an artist who is herself an example of the multiplicity of the novel’s title, perfecting the art of ‘being both’. The other narrative, set in the modern world, focuses on the recently bereaved George or Georgia, and is littered with iPads and porn, framed as ‘photos’ as opposed to the ‘eyes’ of painting. The contrast is striking and deliciously so.
What George learns is that despite her declarations that ‘history…tends to be well and truly over’ is that it is history that is precisely the thing that is never truly over, it’s always lingering beneath the surface, an undercoat to our everyday lives. As her mother says ‘seeing and being seen, Georgie, is rarely simple’, and this is the novel’s main preoccupation; it holds a deeply engrained concern for perception, how things are and how they are seen. ‘And which comes first?’ George recounts her mother asking ‘What we see or how we see?’
Both girls are searching for something within their lives, both motherless, both finding their way in the world in very different yet intriguingly corresponding ways. Smith notes in one interview how our teenage years remain ‘the last malleable state of us’. This sense of human malleability is something that courses throughout this novel, the fact that we are ever changing, forever pretending, forever attempting to ‘be’ so many things and it is this human struggle of attempting to ‘be’ at all that is captured.
Smith is no stranger to the Booker shortlist, and How to be Both may be her third time lucky, but at times the wit seems to border on gimmicky. The formal play Smith introduces forces us to stop and consider our own perceptions as a reader; perception itself a key element of how the novel comes to be. The book seems painted as freshly and quickly as a fresco, divided and yet united in the tale it tells, encouraging us to read and re-read to understand every nuance. Ironically, it is this very urging towards profundity that seems to point up the limitations of the form. You can’t help but feel that there needs to be a little more depth to this tale, and its loose threads leaves you unsatisfied and searching for more; How to be Both is clever, but ultimately a little two-dimensional.
By Thea Hawlin