How to be both

How to be both is one of those books I've seen laying on piles in the bookshop for years. I know I picked it up several times, because although the cover picture looked interesting, it was the blurb that always threw me off:
"A renaissance artist of the 1460s. A child of a child of the 1960s.
Two tales of love and injustice twist into a singular yarn where time gets timeless, knowing gets mysterious, fiction gets real - and all life's givens get given a second chance."
Maybe it was because I read too many stories of book readers travelling back to Jane Austen's time to meet 'the real' Mr Darcy, but somehow I made this into one of those crossing-the-barriers-of-time-and-space-love stories.
This was before I found out about Ali Smith. Whose series of novels on Autumn, Winter and Spring I've been raving on about for the last couple of months. Who also wrote this book, and other books with compelling titles such as There but for the. Also, How to be both was actually shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2014. This couldn't be the love-dovey time travel story I took it for.
And it isn't. It is a beautifully written story on, the title says it, how to be both. Both male and female, both grieving and in love, both secure and insecure, both angry and sad. How to know yourself to be one thing, but trying to fight it and willing yourself to be something else. Both characters are a complex mix, pushing themselves to the mental limits of their own possibilities, trying to take the chances they get while at the same time trying to keep themselves safe, protected. I can't remember the last time I read two such realistic portrayals of one's inner life, of the choices people make because they cannot be fully honest to themselves.
The first part is about Georgia (George, she calls herself), living together with her father and brother since her mother died. She is very sharp, very intelligent, but the death of her mother has left her scarred. When she isn't punishing herself for not being kinder to her mother while she was alive, or to her father who is going out of his mind with grief, she spends a lot of time thinking about the trip they took to Ferrera, Italy, to look at paintings in a hall. Her mother had seen a couple of the paintings online and on a whim decided she wanted to visit the whole palace. There, George is intrigued by what turn out to be the paintings of  Francesco del Cossa. Several of these paintings are reproduced on the inside covers of my copy, but Ali Smith's descriptions are good enough to paint a mental picture.
The second part of the novel took some getting used to. I was expecting the story of George, who has now made a friend and is somewhat moving forward, to come to a resolution. But then the language changed, the sentences became short and waving all over the page. I thought this was one of the short interludes that can also be found in Smith's other novels, but the sentences became longer and more coherent and suddenly I found myself in the middle of Francesco del Cossa's life. I won't spoil much more about that, other than to say that somehow the life of a fifteenth century renaissance painter can be as recognisable and compelling as the life of a modern teenager. And there is more to learn about colours, complexions and compositions than I ever thought.
I don't know how Ali Smith does it, but again this novel left me feeling enriched, as if I know more about the world, its history, and the people in it, without telling a story that goes straight from A to Z and comes to a nicely wrapped up resolution. Her stories are always a bit messy, fringed at the edges, but somehow that makes them all the better. And in the end, the whole novel comes together, with even that memorable cover photograph playing an important part after all. She is so clever in her storytelling, without really showing it. Next time, I won't let the blurb throw me off.