A wonderfully readable ramble through literature

As a book fanatic, I felt sure I’d enjoy a collection of essays on the art of writing; but when I first picked up Artful, I had no idea what a joyous read lay ahead. Part novel, the book opens when the narrator, raw with grief, decides to reread Oliver Twist after a gap of 30 years.

It’s not long before she has a visitation from her dead lover, who looks like a blurred version of her live self. But why is she not speaking authentic words, and why return to life at all? It seems to the addled narrator, that it’s because she’s anxious to finish the lectures she’d been writing ‘On Time’, ‘On Form’, ‘On Edge’ and ‘On Offer and Reflection’.

In reality these essays are adapted from lectures Ali Smith gave at Oxford University; and even without the juxtaposition with the narrator’s foray through grief, they’d have been well worth any reader’s attention. A myriad of writers pepper the pages from Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Plath, to Simon Grey and Graham Greene. The latter, on reading War and Peace, wrote, “When I finished it, I felt, what’s the use of ever writing again — since this has been done.”

I enjoyed the ruminations on rereading too. Smith points out that we’d never expect to understand a piece of music on one listen, but we tend to believe we’ve read a book after reading it once.

In the fictional world, the narrator, who works with trees, reading her lover’s essays, battles with less scholarly thoughts on culture. She’s enjoying Oliver Twist; it sends her to the dictionary. Why, she wonders, is there no overworld when there is an underworld. She rather hankers after the Lionel Bart musical version, and she watches the film on a loop.

Being visited by her dead partner is becoming a problem. The neighbours have started to complain about the smell, and a number of things start to go missing. This comes to a head when, in Brighton, the spirit shoplifts two books from a charity shop.

The narrator knows, logically, that she has summoned her love from her imagination, but she’s confused. And by the time she takes herself to counselling, the visits have stopped, though, missing them, she can’t quite accept this

In the end, it’s the essays, and not the counsellor, that offer redemption. They become personal, morphing into a kind of love letter. The deceased wonders if her partner is reading them; and if so how she is bearing up. It’s clear that, when she was working, her thoughts were often with her lover.

We leave the narrator reading the final pages of Oliver Twist, her grief laid to rest. That’s appropriate, because this Dickens novel is the glue holding all the disparate parts of Smith’s creation together.

This is a wonderfully readable ramble through literature, from this prize-winning literary writer. The book is beautifully produced and includes illustrations, drawings and pictures relating to the text. It’s left me wanting more of Ali Smith; and of Katherine Mansfield and Sylvia Plath. I’m now enjoying a rereading of Oliver Twist.