A deserving contender

HOTEL World in 2001, The Accidental in 2005, How To Be Both in 2014, and now, Autumn in 2017 – Scottish author Ali Smith is certainly no stranger to the Man Booker shortlist. Irish writer Sebastian Barry (whose longlisted novel Days Without End is one of the most remarkable omissions from this year’s shortlist) has described Smith as “Scotland’s Nobel laureate-in-waiting”, and her latest novel further cements that reputation.

Taking place in contemporary Britain, Autumn is the first in a planned quartet of seasonally themed novels. It is a book about mother-daughter relations and feminism, about Brexit (Britain’s upcoming exit from the European Union) and unconventional friendship, about “arty art” and the founding member of the British Pop-Art movement Pauline Boty.

Junior art lecturer Elisabeth Demand is living the dream “if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do”. The book revolves around her precarity, her conflicted relationship with her mother, and her friendship since childhood with Daniel Gluck, a former neighbour almost 70 years her senior. “What you reading?” he asks by way of greeting, every time he meets Elisabeth.

Autumn is beautifully and sensitively written, and not without quite some amount of humour. The near Kafkaesque ordeal of Elisabeth renewing her passport at the post office is hilarious as are her mother’s forays into the world of television. The action is set against the backdrop of the Brexit vote and portrays a society divided, cleavages becoming apparent across landscapes and through families in the construction of fences and the weighted silences around dining tables.

The surreal opening sequence alone, where we are introduced to the dreaming 101-year-old Daniel Gluck, is worth the price of admission in itself. Autumn is one of my favourite books of the year and, to my mind, a deserving contender for this year’s Man-Booker Prize.