Book review: Ali Smith – How to be Both

Ali Smith’s new novel How To Be Both, is the story about the versatility of art told through the lives of a Renaissance artist of the 1460s and a 1960s wild child.

Ali Smith's Man Booker-longlisted novel How To Be Both is something of a "choose your own adventure" story disguised as literary fiction. Split into two parts – both intriguingly titled One – it's confusing at first, but it makes sense when you learn that the book has been printed two ways, the order of the sections reversed between them.

The two halves are both distinctly separate – one takes place inside the mind of the Renaissance artist Francescho del Cossa who, in Smith’s story at least, is a woman who lives her life disguised as a man; the other in that of 16-year-old George (Georgia) living in contemporary Cambridge – but delicately intertwined, too.

Francescho’s section is predominately set in 1400s Italy as she recounts her childhood growing up in the city of Ferrara in a family of brickmakers. We learn of the early death of her mother and her father’s subsequent idea to disguise her as a boy, apprentice her amongst her brothers and thereafter find her work as an artist. The most memorable work of her career turn out to be the frescoes she painted in a local palazzo. All this, however, is recounted retrospectively as we first encounter her in a “picture palace” – London’s National Gallery – seemingly transported through space and time, now suspended in this “purgatorium” in front of one of her own images, invisible to those around her but somehow linked, as if a rope ran between them, to a young boy observing her work.

As befits Francescho’s gender bending, so too this boy isn’t who or what he first appears. (S)he’s actually the androgynous looking George who, we later learn/we’ve previously learnt (depending on which version you’re reading), has been making surreptitious visits to the gallery since her own mother’s untimely death a few months before, the memory of a recent trip they took together to Ferrara to see Francescho’s frescoes still fresh in the young girl’s grieving mind.

As suits her now-legendary mischievous way with form and words, Smith’s experimentation with order turn the novel into something of a chicken-or-egg mystery. “But, which came first,” George remembers her mother asking her during their trip to Italy, referring to the layers of drafts hidden underneath or the surface scene of the frescoes. The image underneath, George argues, was drawn first. But the first thing we see, her mother reminds her, “and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. So does that mean it comes first after all? And does it mean the other picture, if we don’t know about it, may as well not exist?”

To begin with, George is obsessed with certainties; she berates her mother for her bad grammar and can only think in terms of absolutes: real or hypothetical, past or present, male or female. “It can’t be both. It must be one or the other,” she says. Thus the novel is also a Bildungsroman of sorts – one in which the protagonists’ journeys of formation are tied up in the very structure of the novel. Despite the text being exactly the same, regardless of which version you read, the order in which you encounter the two halves can’t help but impact how you make sense of the story.

To read George’s section first seems to suggest Francescho’s section as the product of the grieving girl’s mind, a rather different vision to that constructed in the version that begins with the Italian, one that invokes comparison with the complexity George discovers in the frescoes: “It is like everything is in layers. Things happen right at the front of the pictures and at the same time they continue happening, both separately and connectedly, behind, and behind that, and again behind that, like you can see, in perspective, for miles. Then there are the separate details […] They’re also happening on their own terms. The picture makes you look at both – the close-up happenings and the bigger picture.”

Personally I prefer this version, but then again perhaps that’s simply because it was the one I read. This tantalising treat of a novel proves it’s possible to be two things at once, but whether we can see it ourselves is the real conundrum; like George, we’re more comfortable with either/or. Admittedly, this more philosophical aspect of Smith’s work makes for more demanding reading than most literary fiction, but like the multiple perspectives George sees in the frescoes, the novel operates on manifold levels – underneath her literary tricks Smith is also spot-on when it comes to characterisation. She also spins an excellent yarn or two.