Which comes first? her unbearable mother is saying. So does that mean it comes first after all? And does that mean the other picture, if we don’t know about it, may as well not exist? Because it was done first.īut the first thing we see, her mother said, and most times the only thing we see, is the one on the surface. The picture below came first, George says. … The picture underneath or the picture on the surface? Although entranced by del Cossa’s frescos, George is less than enamoured with her mother’s detailed explanation of how art restorers sometimes discover under drawings that are significantly different than the finished work. At one point George recalls a visit with her mother and young brother to the Palazzo die Diamanti in Ferrara, near Bologna.

The questions come from George’s mum, a freethinking and subversive woman who challenges her two children to consider art and history in new ways. Many of the scenes, particularly in the George part of the book, pose questions about ways of seeing. Instead what we have is a finely constructed dual narrative in which each story dovetails with and reflects the other and where the very duality of structure is fundamental to a key theme in the novel - how the meaning of images and words change when looked at from different perspectives. It isn’t a book of two distinct and separate halves. Neither reaction would be doing justice to this book. Or worse still, querying whether this approach was simply a marketing gimmick. I imagine many people would decide this book was not for them based on that description, maybe thinking Smith had really written just two short stories rather than a full novel. Two stories, both labelled part one, that can be read in any order. Others would begin with the story of that teenager, a 21st century Londoner known as George, who is subsumed by grief over her mother’s death. Some readers would open it to find the spirit of the Renaissance Italian painter Francesco del Cossa awakening to discover a teenager scrutinising one of his frescos. The reader wouldn’t know until they started reading which version they had purchased since both had identical covers. Most of the advance publicity for this novel focused on the fact that there would be two versions of the book on sale. In How to be both, Ali Smith provides a masterclass in how to play with the form of the novel and stuff it with layers of meaning and yet still make it highly readable.

How to Be Both by Ali Smith