How To Be Both by Ali Smith: book review

How to be Both Ali Smith

If there is one thing I learn from all the literary prizes and commendations received by Ali Smith’s novel ‘How To Be Both’, it is that we can so easily fall prey to the bells, whistles and buzz words of a good media campaign.

‘How To Be Both’ was marketed as a genre defining, a creative work of ‘literature’ that is bending all the rules, a novel of ultimate importance in the literary world. The book hailed the rebirth of stylistic originality, while Ali Smith has been described as ‘a literary genius’. Well that’s just all fine and fabulous, but the problem is, I absolutely hated it (shock horror!) and I don’t know a single person who ‘genuinely’ liked the book.

‘How To Be Both’ is composed of two stories, with the novel’s main selling point being that it can be read in two different ways. We have a story of a teenager called George, who exists in contemporary England, and a story of an Italian Renaissance painter named Francesco del Cossa. Depending on which copy of the book you happen to pick up, will determine which narrative of the two you will read first (half of the books were printed with the story of George first, and the rest were printed with the artist’s story first). The order in which each story is read is supposed to alter the entire reading experience, making it completely different from one to another.

When this book was recommended to me, I was encouraged to pick up a copy that starts with George’s narrative. The two narratives are linked, one might say through an intertwinement of love, grief and art. George and her mother had taken a spontaneous trip to Italy to see a fresco that her mother became intrigued with, painted by del Cossa. As it turned out this was George’s last trip with her mom, who passed away soon after, which led to George’s subsequent fascination in del Cossa’s life as a way to remember her mom and possibly as a way to deal with her grief.

Both George’s and Francesco’s narratives have stream-of-consciousness prose, which is not an easy read (to say the least) and requires ‘a lot’ of concentration; it’s definitely not one of those books that you’d take with for a fun holiday read. George’s teenage thoughts move lightning fast between the present and past memories, while Francesco’s half of the novel follows a bumblebee’s flight pattern, darting forward and backward through memories of childhood and old age. Yet the writing style in each section is very different. Francesco’s narrative is stylistically experimental; more poetic and fragmented, and although there are some very creative and thought-provoking prose, I found this to be completely nullified by the abstract style of writing that Ali Smith adopted for Francesco’s monologue, which is not only confusing and extremely laborious to read, but flows poorly and not in a style believable to the setting’s time period. Reading George’s story first (which was not easy to begin with), all of a sudden seemed to feel like a reward compare to Francesco’s half second, which felt like the ultimate punishment.

After finishing this book, I couldn’t help but wonder about the way the judges who sit on literary prize panels make their decisions these days. Do they make decisions based on the merit of a work, or do they make decisions based on the fact that they, like everyone else, get so caught up in the supposed newness of an idea, which they desperately want to see as genius, that simply isn’t there?

I know that I am not alone in seeing Ali Smith’s ‘How To Be Both’ as far from the genius it has been claimed to be. I think what we have now is a large proportion of the reading public who are too worried about coming across as ignorant, or that they somehow just ‘didn’t get it’. So they smile, nod and perpetuate the marketing jargon which makes us all think that ‘How To Be Both’ is the second coming of the novel, all so that their supposedly ‘more learned’ friends won’t think them stupid. In my opinion there are a whole lot of disappointed book buyers out there who have spent good money on something that they were told was going to be brilliant and ultimately left them a little more empty than before they’d read it.