... no government was ever going to give a fuck about and no history was ever going to think it worth recording never mind bowing its head even momentarily to the deaths and fragilities of any of the millions and millions and millions of individual people, with their detailed generic joyful elegiac fruitful wasted nourishing undernourished common individual lives, who were suffering or dying right now or had died over the past year and a half in what was after all just the latest plague and whose gone souls swirled invisible in shifting murmurations above every everyday day that we wandered around in, below these figurations, full of what we imagined was purpose.[p. 32]
The majority of Companion Piece takes place in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. Sandy Gray is a middle-aged female artist who works by layering painted words, one atop the other. Her father is in hospital and she can't visit as much as she'd like, due to Covid restrictions. Instead she looks after his dog and his house, and waits for the phone to ring with news. The call that kicks off the story, though, is not from the hospital but from a university classmate who Sandy once helped analyse a poem. The classmate, Martina Pelf (nee Inglis), has had a strange experience when returning to the UK with a medieval artifact: "The passports. The blank officials. The inexplicable and uncalled-for detainment. The revelation of the artisan beauty. The disembodied voice in the locked room." The voice said 'curlew or curfew, you choose'.
This sparks a series of recollections: Sandy's time at university, episodes with her father, the moment at which she lost hope. People start to arrive at her house, despite the risk of Covid: first it's Martina's acronym-spouting twin children Lea and Eden, accusing Sandy of having an affair with their mother and somehow changing her; then it's a mysterious young woman with a long-beaked bird on her shoulder, who seems to have been branded with a V for Vagabond. Martina, on a Zoom call, is convinced that this is the maker of the Boothby Lock, the beautiful piece of metalwork which was the cause of her delay at passport control.
And the final quarter of the novel -- shifting abruptly from Sandy and her unwelcome guests -- is the story of a female smith who is raped, at curfew, to prevent her completing her apprenticeship. (Fornication is forbidden, whether or not it is by choice.) The girl, who's never named, wakes in a ditch, and makes up her mind to die: but lives, because she's adopted by a baby bird, a curlew.
I think the cover, a Hockney print of a path through woodland ('we're not out of the woods yet', says the nurse about Sandy's father), inclined me to expect a connection with the Seasonal Quartet. If there is one -- apart from the contemporary setting, apart from the emphasis on art, apart from the solitude of the protagonist(s) -- it's subtle. And how much is real? Is the story of the medieval girl as real as Sandy's life in lockdown, or is she a story told to explain that cryptic 'curlew or curfew' mutter? And given the title, is the novel about how we reach for companionship (her father's dog; a long-beaked bird; a classmate from university; a book) even while thinking we're fine alone?
Beautiful, subtle, thought-provoking -- and vividly evoking a time that is still too close for comfort.
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