‘Across the country, people Googled: what is EU?’

If you thought the Brexit novel would take years to appear, think again. Tim Martin enjoys a disconcerting start to Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet

have had to wait years for contemporary events to make their way through the cultural sausagemaker; the first novelistic responses to 9/11 took 14 months to start trickling in, with William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition in February 2003, and even then he’d written most of the book beforehand. Perhaps publishing moves faster these days. Perhaps rolling, real-time novelism is the only sane reaction to a post-truth political climate. Or perhaps Smith has the keys to the wormhole generator, and is scribbling away in a wondrous time-space continuum that bends to her laws.

Autumn is the first in a projected quartet of novels themed around the seasons of the year – and, assuming no lapse in the speed of production, around the seasons of this year in particular. As often in Smith’s novels, however, the time it describes is fluid, bendy and elusive. A 101-year-old man lies in a nursing home, locked in the “increased sleep period [that] happens when people are close to death”; in his dreams he is an Ariel-like sprite, fluttering down a beach in his raiment of leaves. A 30-something lecturer visits him in hospital in Brexit Britain, noting the “fence three metres high with a roll of razorwire along the top of it” that now encircles the village’s patch of common land. In a subsequent chapter, the same woman, as a nine-year-old child, falls in love with a neighbour who will one day be an old man dreaming in a hospital bed.

Other stories are older. A Sixties artist contemplates painting the former model Christine Keeler. Keeler, as a child, helps her friends unearth an unexploded Luftwaffe bomb. There are walk-on parts for John Keats, a Nazi officer in wartime and the prosecution lawyer in the Profumo case. Everywhere, stories cross-pollinate and grow from one another’s seeds.

This book is a cousin to Smith’s previous novel, the multiply prize-winning How to Be Both. That book spliced the tale of a clever child with a fictional life story for the Renaissance artist Francesco del Cossa, whose frescoes in Ferrara depict complex allegories for the months of the year. In Smith’s invented version, del Cossa was a woman who passed through life as a man, and much of Autumn revolves around the life and work of another half-forgotten painter, Pauline Boty, who died at the age of 28 in 1966.

For other writers, Boty’s story might fill an entire novel. She was the only female pop artist, a woman working in an RCA

This is quick work – novels about 9/11 took more than a year to appear