Fraught Christmas back home — ‘even in bleak

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Ali Smith Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 UBLISHED barely four months after the Brexit referendum result, Ali Smith’s novel Autumn opened with “go home” slogans daubed in English villages and people Googling “what is EU?”, “move to Scotland” and “Irish passport application”.

This, a sequel of sorts, has Trump boasting about making people say “merry Christmas” again, Nicholas Soames barking across the Commons chamber at Scottish National Party MP Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh, and a fair whack of the sort of kitchen-table political debate that Smith is particularly good at capturing.

Winter may have taken a year to arrive instead of a few months, but make no mistake, Smith is still writing to, and about, the present moment.

One character from Autumn has a small, important part to play, but otherwise the cast is new. On the surface, it’s the story of Art (short for Arthur, but Smith certainly has fun with the abbreviation), whose vengeful ex-girlfriend has just taken over his Twitter feed and started to post nonsense on Art in Nature, his beloved poseur blog about puddles and bird watching. Art is supposed to be taking the Twitter vandal home for Christmas to visit his mother in Cornwall; instead, in desperation, he offers £1,000 to a woman he meets at a bus stop to pose as her instead.

But home, when they arrive, isn’t particularly Christmassy. Art’s mother, Sophia, is a former businesswoman who now ping-pongs dismally around her vast country pile, hallucinating and refusing to eat in case she’s being poisoned. Her sister Iris, once summoned, turns out to be a veteran Greenham campaigner and eco-warrior who knows just what part Sophia has played, across the years, in making her life miserable.