Published in 2017, in November, and therefore right at the beginning of winter, this is the second in Ali Smith's seasonal quartet. I read Autumn in 2023, and then somehow delayed following up on it. Even now, I'm coming a bit late to Winter, as many of the key events take place at Christmas, which is fortunately now behind us.

The cast of characters in the two books (apart from a couple of intriguing cameos) is entirely different. But there are obvious similarities in tone:

1. There's a disorienting opening.

After a brief riff on the word "dead", Smith swivels to a peculiar, surreal scene. In Autumn it was the drifting, dying Daniel Gluck who opened the book for us. This time it's 70-something Sophia Cleves, who's suffering from some sort of delusion (or hallucination or vision -- I'm not sure what you'd call it). She sees, constantly, a floating head... She starts to talk to it. We're never told exactly what's wrong here. But we later find out she has not been eating, so we presume there's some mental predicament going on as a result of malnutrition. It's a disconcerting start, though.

2. Smith continues to bemoan the state of Britain.

As well she might.

As Sophie Gilbert puts it: "Smith is conducting a remarkable experiment: responding to current events in something like real time." In Autumn we were reeling from the first effects of Brexit (which continue here, of course). In Winter, we've just had a British prime minister telling those who see themselves as citizens of the world that they're citizens of nowhere (2016). As the year turns, Trump I is looming. And before the book finishes, we've had the Grenfell fire (2017).

There's a lot that's clearly off-kilter about Britain. Sophia has the impression that she has lost the ability to feel. It's not only the atrocities, the torture, the fleeing people. It's "also, just, you know, ordinary everyday terribleness, ordinary people just walking around on the streets of the country she'd grown up in, who looked ruined, Dickensian, like poverty ghosts from a hundred and fifty years ago."

It's a world we recognize all too well. Bank personnel are a dying breed. And the strange medium of virtuality we live in has thrown a pall of unreality over everything (Sophia's son, Art, for example, who is the first character we meet, writes a blog called Art in Nature, for which he just makes stuff up...).

Charlotte -- Art's girlfriend until she gets totally sick of his artificiality, and dumps him, while wreaking a somewhat cruel revenge on his belongings, and hijacking his social media feed -- is utterly discouraged: "Solstice, she said. You said it. Darkest days ever. There's never been a time like this." If only you knew, Charlotte...



3. Smith picks up other threads from history in a compare-and-contrast operation.

In Autumn we had the backdrop of Gluck's family, facing the vitriolic antisemitism of the 1930s/40s. Here we have the protest movements of the 1970s/80s. Sophia's older sister, Iris (shortened, perhaps a little too meaningfully, to Ire), has been a life-long campaigner. Sophia has never understood her, and the two have been estranged for many years before this fateful Christmas brings them together. We flash back to Christmas 1977, when Sophia is staying, somewhat aloofly, in the rambling Cornwall house that Iris and her friends are squatting in. The group is campaigning against nuclear weapons and the irresponsible use of chemicals. Later, Iris takes part in the Greenham Common protests (which began in 1981). Even in her late 70s, she's in Greece, helping asylum-seekers. Iris sees hers as a lucky generation, "to have had all those angry summers, all that strength of feeling, the summers of such love". Art's generation (he was born in the mid-1980s) represents the "summer of Scrooge. AND the winter of Scrooge, AND the spring, AND the autumn".

4. She weaves layers of cultural references into the story.

In Autumn, we had, inter alia, Pauline Boty. In Winter, there are references to Charlie Chaplin and Elvis Presley, as well as Barbara Hepworth, and Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol (a kind of parallel, as the sisters, while still bickering, do lay down their arms over this Christmas period, and Sophia becomes marginally less cantankerous and world-weary), and Shakespeare's Cymbeline ("a play about a kingdom subsumed in chaos, lies, powermongering, division and a great deal of poisoning and self-poisoning"). The references are informative, and no doubt offer those inclined many rabbitholes to go down. But they're also ever so slightly graunchy.


A Hepworth sculpture (pictured at the back of the book)

5. Smith's powers of observation are wonderful.

She really NOTICES things. Little things. Trees that have been "rubbered-in under that bouncy plastic stuff", for example.

Or the way we feel about aging: "You never stop being yourself on the inside, whatever age people thing you are by looking at you from the outside." So true, so true...

And she puts her finger beautifully on the whole point of winter (a propos of which, this, on how to "side with winter", is really fascinating).

Art muses: "That's what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again. An exercise in adapting yourself to whatever frozen or molten state it brings you..."

Sophia thinks: "There was this different quality to the light even only four days past the shortest day; the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light." Totally! The Celts were right to say that spring began on 1 February.

6. It's funny.

None of the rest of this discussion should allow us to forget that Winter is often very amusing. The whole Christmas dinner scenario is a wonderful set piece...


Portrait of Miss Barbara Hepworth, painted by Ethel Walker

***

The most interesting characters in Winter are Sophia and Art. They're the conflicted ones. They're the ones that I, at least, most identify with.

There are three other women whose portrayals are more problematic:

We don't learn much about Charlotte, apart from that she's fed up with Art, and who wouldn't be? But what we do learn makes her sound a bit of a know-all goody-goody.

"Rough-elegant Iris" is the one who left home in disgrace: "Iris: a bloody liability. Trouble. Wasting her life. Warned and warned again. Reputation. Known to the authorities. Police record. Their father crying soundlessly into his supper. Their mother saying her usual downcast nothing, looking down at the nothing in her hands." Iris's courage, and her determination to be real, and to face reality unflinchingly, mean she's engaging. But she's like every aid worker everywhere: Just a little too self-consciously noble... Iris is a little bit cardboard-cutout for me: The all-her-life activist, always dependable, always fun, always far-sighted.

Lux (short for Velux, we're told, though we really don't know what to make of that...) is the woman whom -- romcom-style -- Art drafts in to accompany him to his mother's for Christmas, Charlotte being no longer available. Lux is Croatian by birth, and moved with her family to Canada. "The problem is," she says, "my family is war-wounded however far away we go" (which reminded me of The Ministry of Pain by Dubravka Ugresic). Drawn by her love of Shakespeare, Lux goes to Britain. She is undocumented, and is now caught up in all the Brexit melee. She is therefore the book's spokesperson for the migrant.

Lux articulates a lot of things that I entirely sympathize with. About Cymbeline, for example, she says: "It's like the people in the play are living in the same world but separately from each other... If they could just step out of themselves, or just hear and see what's happening right next to their ears and eyes, they'd see it's the same play they're all in, the same world, that they're all part of the same story." At another point, she says, "The only room I'm used to hearing people talk about is the NO room, the NO MORE room." (To which Sophia replies: "It's sad but true... There IS no more room.") Lux perseveres: "Human beings have to be more ingenious than this, and more generous. We've got to come up with a better answer."

Smith is often not subtle, and some characters become mouthpieces. Lux is one.


Even Bologna gets winter...

Sophia, on the other hand, is maddening, but complex.

She has never sympathized with Iris's crowd: "Ethical alternative anarchic living. Weak excuse for living irresponsibly. Illegal dirty hippy-hangover pseudo-romantic squat." Don't hold back there, Sophia... She finds them both too serious and too wild ("They said things in acronyms all the time; the women draped themselves over the men and the men talked in capital letters"). They, on the other hand, find her too superficial, too naive, too unthinking.

It's true she's naive. At one point, she tells Art: "Why would the people who do things in the world want anything but the BEST for the world?" And yes, one of the reasons the world is in the mess it's in is that too many people think like that...

But at some point, she hardened. Into a first-and-foremost businesswoman, with little time for her son. Into an obsessively private person ("Art knows the doors of the reminiscence have closed, as surely as if the Reminiscence is a cinema or a theatre and the show is over, the rows of seats empty, the audience gone home"). Into the kind of person who cuts her sister even out of her memories. Into the kind of woman haunted by a stone head... (Not that she's afraid of the head. Sophia doesn't do fear. She's even quite nice to it. Nicer than she is to lots of people.)

Yet this is a woman who used to be sensitive: "It takes serious talent," says Iris, when they're still young, "to be as sensitive as Soph is." So what happened?

One evening in the early 1980s, she starts to be harassed by -- who? government agents? We're not entirely sure, but it's clear they're very serious about what they're doing. She's brave about it. Doesn't cower. But what does she actually do after that? We assume it's something to do with Iris. Indeed, later, during the Christmas kind-of-reconciliation at the heart of the book, she assures Iris she never told anyone anything (or at least not anything important or true). But Iris is obviously not convinced.

Much later, we learn about the love of Sophia's life. She met him, an older man, that same Christmas when she was staying with her sister and her friends at the squat (which Sophia later buys, by the way). The two get on very well, but lose touch, and find each other only many years later. At that point, she rationalizes that the age difference precludes a long-term relationship, but it sounds as though she's scared of what she's feeling: "The love of my life made my life like, like, I don't know. Like a double decker bus whose steering has gone wrong." So when she becomes pregnant, she looks for someone else to marry (a gay entertainer, who needs the cover of family life, but is never a father to Art).

All of which is intriguing, because it's so far from black-and-white.

Art is also frustrating. Alongside his faux-blogger activities, he has a day job that involves combing the internet for any signs of copyright infringement. He reports to a bot. He's a bit thoughtless, a bit helpless.

And he's one of those people who bang on about the "choice" that migrants make -- even when migrants often have no real choice. "They chose to come and live here," he says, "They ran that risk. It's not our responsibility." He says he's "not a politico", without realizing that pretty much everything is political.

But he's obviously not had the easiest time, and you also feel that some of his inadequacies are shared by many of us. Charlotte hates his "default to selfishness". But how many of us are better? He doesn't see how you can change things, so he doesn't try: "It is a waste of valuable energy to get angry about the kind of thing you can't do anything about, the kind of thing Charlotte goes on and on about."

Yet he does change, to some extent. His blog ends up being co-written by a communal group of writers. And he eventually starts hallucinating too, seeing a slice of landscape hanging over his head... Maybe that will be good for him (Iris: "Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we're supposed to be seeing").

Most tellingly, by the end of the book Art is horrified that people might actually crowdfund a boat to intercept the craft sent out to rescue migrants in trouble at sea...



***

"He is like no man she has ever spent time with," Sophia tells us of the man she met that hippy Christmas, and re-met many years later. He's funny, whimsical, and informative, in a light-hearted kind of way. I noted, as I read: "He reminds me of the ancient guy in Autumn..." Well, maybe he was that guy... I completely didn't notice that she (once) calls him "Danny" until it was pointed out to me...

If it is the same person, he would have been 70 when he met up with Sophia again. Definitely a bit old to be starting a family...

Art, meanwhile, works for a division of SA4A (the same company that patrolled those ominous new fences in Autumn...).

So, of course, we wonder how these linkages will be developed in the next part of the quartet.

I think Alexandra Harris sums up the experience of reading Winter very well: "Leaping, laughing, sad, generous and winter-wise, this is a thing of grace."