Ali Smith tackles the season of Brexit
WINTER by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99)
ALI Smith has said “the novel, as a form, has always naturally been about its own contemporary nature”. In her Booker Prizeshortlisted Autumn, she took the EU referendum as a starting point and wrote in real time. Its follow-up, Winter, is the second in this quartet of books responding to current affairs seasonally. For a novel clearly put together at such speed, in tandem with a fast-paced news cycle, it is cleverly constructed and elegantly written.
The central thread is a modern Christmas story. Sophia lives alone in Cornwall with a cardboard cut-out of her deceased partner, a famous entertainer. She is anxious about her son Arthur bringing his girlfriend Charlotte home for the festive family gathering. Meanwhile, in Whitechapel, Arthur is also panicking. Charlotte has dumped him and rather than tell his mother he pays £1,000 to a mysterious young woman he meets at a bus stop to pretend to be his long term girlfriend for Christmas. The post-truth era is a theme.
Sophia has a right-on older sister called Iris and they bicker about their diverging memories of their childhood and marvel at how Arthur can look anyone up on the internet. The younger generation is more brutal. Charlotte wreaks a sophisticated revenge on Arthur by hacking into his Twitter account and blog to ruin his reputation. Charlotte’s fake tweets allow Smith to show off her wit, in particular with riffs on the real meaning of the snowflake (the natural ones versus the modern phenomenon of millennials, who take offence too easily).
Brexit looms. Theresa May is quoted and Iris, who works helping migrants in Greece, pointedly reminds her sister that they are named after places in Italy and Greece, where their father fought “for Europe”.
Charlotte’s impersonator, Lux, has come to London from Croatia. As an outsider, Lux is able to ask questions about Arthur’s father (revealing a love story in Sophia’s past that is one of the most moving parts of the novel) but as a character is not quite believable, with something of the manic pixie dream girl trope about her, unable to rein in her opinions. She is also a lesbian but Smith throws this in without going further.
There are newsy interludes that don’t fit into the main thrust of the plot, about the man Smith refers to as “the new American President”, with brilliant dismissiveness, and the House of Commons, where there’s a clash between a female MP who used to be an actress and a male stockbroker turned MP, who uses “banter” as an excuse for rudeness.
They distract from the story, which is compelling enough to stand alone, but are interesting in themselves as mini essays. Winter does a lot in 322 pages. We are led to contemplate the evisceration of the environment, the changing nature of political protest since Greenham Common, where Iris was, and the frustration of mundane bureaucratic processes like going to the bank that Smith also recorded sharply in Autumn. Such an ambitious span of themes could easily feel garbled but it is testament to Smith’s skill as a writer that she pulls it off. It’s both an engaging human story and a place for wider topical observations. Bring on Spring.