Brief 2: Time of the Season of the Time

 I’ve finished reading ‘Summer’, the last in Ali Smith’s remarkable “Seasons” tetralogy. It’s for books like this that I wish I was a better reader - that I lingered longer on a phrase, made copious notes and cross-referenced flashing thoughts, that I worked harder to experience the work on every level, rather than just work my way through as quickly as I can, understanding what I can.

How to describe Smith as a writer to someone who’s never read anything by her (as I hadn’t before I read ‘Autumn’ a couple of years ago)?

Witty, wild, angry, allusive, hopeful, in love with art, in love with words, childlike at times, confusing, undoubtedly confusing, magic-real, real, topical, historical, quizzy … sometimes it’s like reading a particularly articulate twitter rant, sometimes a crossword puzzle, sometimes you just stop and wish you could read a particular sentence or thought over and over for the first time.

Each book takes a particular work of art/artist as its centrepoint (Pauline Boty, Barbara Hepworth, Tacita Dean, Lorenza Mazzetti, though others such as Rilke, Chaplin and Einstein play significant roles too).

Each book stands alone but gradually the links, thematically and plotwise, between them are revealed.

The books take place in real-time (or as close to real-time as has ever been attempted in the novel before) – Brexit is all over the first one, ‘Autumn’, written in 2016, and Covid is all over ‘Summer’. Fear, nature and the fate of humanity, immigration, war, activism, these themes run heavily through each book.

Sometimes the unexplained and the loose ends are frustrating, sometimes I think she thinks we’ll understand what she’s saying better than we do.

But the overall effect is overwhelming and enormously beautiful. It is also educational in the best way, someone sharing what excites them and drawing hitherto unconsidered links from the present to little & well-known moments in history.

I think “ekphrastic” is a good word to describe the books – the author is always saying to the reader “here, here’s a picture, look at it, dwell on it,” whether that’s an actual work of art or an image she creates.

There is so much of the absurdity, corruption and bureaucracy of modern life. There is such a keen and empathetic understanding of modern technology and the world as encountered by young people.

Yet the “main character” (as much as there is one main character) is a 100+ year old Jewish German-British man who has lived through the two World Wars.

I never reread books, haven’t reread anything since I was a child, but I’d be quite tempted to with these. There’s so much I’ve missed first time around – so many links, so many hints, so many exquisite phrases and unforgettable images. I don’t feel I’ve made good sense of it at all yet, and I’d really like to.

Perhaps a few years will be needed to fully judge if these are great novels or not, but, if they are, at the very least, urgent documents of our times, then what desperate yet magical times we live in.