How to Be Both by Ali Smith

How to be both is the dazzling new novel by Ali Smith.

Passionate, compassionate, vitally inventive and scrupulously playful, Ali Smith's novels are like nothing else.

How to be both is a novel all about art's versatility. Borrowing from painting's fresco technique to make an original literary double-take, it's a fast-moving genre-bending conversation between forms, times, truths and fictions. There's a renaissance artist of the 1460s. There's the child of a child of the 1960s. Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, structural gets playful, knowing gets mysterious, fictional gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance.

[Ho this is a mighty twisting thing fast as a / fish being pulled by its mouth on a hook / if a fish could be fished through a / 6 foot wall made of bricks or an / arrow if an arrow could fly in a leisurely]

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(Hamish Hamilton, 28 August 2014, 372 pages, hardback, borrowed from @GlasgowLib)

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I've become a reluctant fan of Ali Smith in recent years. I really disliked her book The Accidental which put me off her work. However, I've enjoyed her Seasonal Quartet, Boy Meets Girl and Hotel World that I'm studying for an Open University course. So I decided to read more of her fiction. I really enjoyed How To Be Both which uses a similar structure to Hotel World. I found the historical sections the most enjoyable. This section is based on the real life of a relatively unknown painter, Francesco del Cossa. This is the inventive and intriguing section of the novel. Smith almost invents her own language. The contemporary story features a girl known as George. This is safer and slightly less satisfying. The book is available in two versions, one where Francesco comes first and one where George does. My copy had Francesco's story first. Maybe that's why I enjoyed it more?