Final flourish
Covid-19 seeps into the picture as Ali Smith concludes her quartet of novels named after the seasons.
Autumn, Winter,
Summer. also that it is about how the dead come back.
One of the virtues of Smith’s work is that she can write young and old characters with equal sensitivity. The novel opens with Sacha, who is a millennial with grave fears about the end of all things, and her aggravating younger brother Robert, who can’t wait for the apocalypse. He is enthralled to a computer game where you can torture people, and I would not be surprised if such things existed. We segue to Daniel, and the stitches begin to link, then to Irene and the pattern begins to make itself clear. The sections about internment of German-born citizens on the
Isle of Man countered to the imprisonment and release (one might say flushing) of asylum seekers by SA4A, a fictional contractor in the previous books, are the most emotionally wrenching. There is another disregarded female artist; this time the film-maker Lorenza Mazzetti. So altogether it comes together. But does it end satisfactorily?
It has all Smith’s exuberance with wordplay. “Thereby hangs a tale”, pondering over what the opposite of dishevelled is, the correct pronunciation of Roughton Heath, a teenage boy vacillating while watching pornography between “banal” and “anal”. These are the kind of flourishes she can almost do by rote by now. The opening is a brilliant cadenza about the use of the word “so”, and how it can be so ambiguous.
Events, dear boy, events, as Harold Macmillan didn’t say. The sequence began with Brexit and has to end with Covid-19. The pandemic sidles into the narrative almost unawares, and I think we can all appreciate that concern. Smith doesn’t aim and miss: one character says “Write about that. The mighty Etonians brought low one more time and the meek revealed as the real might after all”. Or “There’s a lot of powerplay in liking and being liked. Such a powerful connection, it’s a chance to make the world bigger for someone else. Or smaller. That’s always the choice we’ve got”.
The opening pages include this: “When so many people voted people into power who looked them straight in the eye and lied to them: so?”
The bigger question the novel poses is: what next? One thing alone is certain. There is no normal to which we will be going back. Smith has always elegantly entangled aesthetics and ethics; never more so than here. As always, she doesn’t take sides in the argument, but merely presents it. It’s up to us to judge.