It says something about the way prize juries work that Ali Smith's exceptional novel How to be Both has not won any of the major literary awards for which it has been shortlisted - until now. Anyone can see its virtuosity, but I imagine it's so unusual that it has often split the vote. How to be Both won the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction (formerly known as the Orange Prize), and everyone who had championed the book since it was published almost a year ago breathed a sigh of relief. After not winning the Man Booker and not winning the Folio, there was this, finally.
But in all the delight, it’s worth pausing to wonder whether a writer as consistently inventive, as bracingly thoughtful and as narratively skilled as Smith should have to win prizes in order to gain attention. In 50 years’ time she will not be remembered because she won this or didn’t win that. She will be remembered because her books are fearless and witty. She has redrawn the floorplan of fiction.
Critics have cast her as a latter-day Virginia Woolf, particularly because of this latest book’s debt to Woolf’s novel Orlando, with its time travel, its porous gender borders and its humour.
How to be Both is divided in two - one part is told from the point of view (but not quite in the voice) of George, a 16-year-old girl grieving for her mother; another is told by a 15th-century Italian painter, a chatty sort who has fallen to earth, or shot through time, to look down on her in spirit. With experimental gusto, the publishers printed the book in a split run, so that which section you get first is a matter of chance.
The ambiguously named George is a savvy adolescent, an existential overthinker, who identifies with European stars of the Sixties: Monica Vitti, Sylvie Vartan. We find her trudging through daily life while plagued by memories of her mum: “both at once”, “at exactly the same time”. She remembers a trip to Italy, where her mother took her to see some frescoes painted 500 years earlier but only recovered from under a whitewash in the 19th century: the room once contained both, whiteness and ornateness, at exactly the same time. The characters on the walls are beautiful, George thinks, but are they men or women? “Male, female, both,” her mother says. Francesco del Cossa - a real painter from the pages of history - is, in the novel, a cross-dressed, re-named girl, who, in turn, takes George to be a boy. George’s mother was an academic but also a revolutionary, who used pop-up technology to overlay internet sites with subliminal messages.
How to be Both is a brilliant novel of ideas. We almost never exist in a single tense, it suggests, or have a fixed identity.
Smith has a gift for conveying the ordinary speech of teenagers, and for the dynamics of family - and her resuscitated painter, “Francesco”, is exactly the kind of vivid dare George herselfwould have dreamed onto the page.
The Daily Telegraph
How to be Both, $26.99, from Whitcoulls.
