Companion Piece

In Ali Smith's 'Companion Piece,' a chance phone call shatters the mundane life of Sandy Gray, a visual artist experiencing lockdown. Her former college classmate, Martina, recounts a baffling and unsettling incident: a day spent inexplicably detained by border officials in a room with a cryptic riddle—'curlew or curfew, you choose.' This peculiar interaction ignites a narrative tapestry that intertwines Sandy's atomized present with the distant past of a young blacksmith, Sarah, hounded as a vagrant in 16th-century England during the time of the Black Plague. As Sandy attempts to decipher Martina's riddle and the underlying disquiet, Smith masterfully explores themes of loneliness, connection, freedom, and the arbitrary nature of control. The novel asks profound questions about history's echoes, the power of storytelling, and how past injustices resonate in our contemporary world, offering a provocative and timely reflection on our shared human experience.