Published in 2019, this is the third in Ali Smith's Seasonal Quartet (after, predictably, Autumn and Winter).

Smith is always very readable. And yet there's a lot packed into these seasonal studies. Layers and layers.

In this one, there are three key characters.

Firstly, Richard Lease, a TV and film director, mostly memorable for stuff he did in the 1970s, is mourning the death of his friend and inspiration, Paddy (aka Patricia Heal). Adding to his depression is his attempted collaboration with a writer called Martin Terp. They're working on a project connected with Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke, two writers who coincidentally lived in the same small Swiss town in 1922, but never met. Terp wants to jazz the story up a little, much to Lease's disgust. Paddy helped him get some sort of handle on the material, making him even more sure that Terp's approach is the wrong one.

Secondly, there's Brittany Hall (her name is shortened to Brit, encouraging us to see her a kind of placeholder for the nation). She works with "deets", who -- we soon realize -- are detainees: "I'm a DCO at one of the IRCs employed by the private security firm SA4A... Brittany, her mother said. What language are you speaking?" Duly interpreted, she's a Detainee Custody Officer at a UK Immigration Removal Centre. Yes, those exist. She works in a place designed for a 72-hour detention period, but some people, many of whom have been through terrible times, have spent years there (Smith took her details from news reports and anonymous testimony she personally gathered). And SA4A? Well, it's that shadowy company that has appeared already in Autumn and Winter.

Thirdly, there's Florence Smith. Aged 12, and a bit of a Wunderkind. Remarkable for her ability to pass through barriers, including --legendarily -- through all the layers of security surrounding the boss of Brittany's facility, who, as a result, actually pays some people to clean the toilets... Partly, her barrier-crossing is magic. But partly, it's the result of the way things are: "People can look right through me," she says. "Certain white people in particular can look right through young people and also black and mixed race people like we aren't here."



The three link up, of course. Florence (practising her usual magic) manages to persuade Brittany to accompany her to Scotland, where she (magic again) manages to persuade Richard not to kill himself. (I really like the peculiarly modern-day English turn of phrase she uses to achieve this aim: "I really need you not to do that.")

And, once linked, they encounter Alda, the woman with the coffee van that doesn't serve coffee. Alda (along with many others, also called Alda, or Aldo if they're men) is involved in the Auld Alliance network, an underground railroad operation that aims to help "illegals". They work at "disappearing people from a system which has already disappeared them".

But this is where we don't get a totally happy ending. Florence has been summoned to Scotland, over the grapevine, to meet her mother. Why she insisted on taking Brittany isn't entirely clear, but we assume it's to give the detainer some kind of shot at redemption. But it doesn't work. Realizing she has been left behind and outwitted, Brittany calls the SA4A hotline... The mother and daughter have only a brief time to embrace before they're surrounded by uniforms, loaded into separate vans, and driven away. We're not sure what happens to them. Is the mother deported? Or has media attention assured she gets at least a stay of execution? And Florence? It depends whether she has legal papers. We hope Florence will be able to talk both of them out of their predicament.

By the end, Richard is making a film called A Thousand Thousand People, documenting the work of the Auld Alliance. He's staying in Scotland: "I don't belong, they know I don't, I know I don't. But I feel like I do. What I feel is welcome." (Interesting formulation. It's a bit how we feel in Sarawak.)

But Brittany missed her chance to show compassion... During her introductory period at the facility, she learned some fairly horrible ways to treat people, and at first, she still finds that abnormal. But you adjust to all kinds of things, including the meting out of cruelty: "We're not a hotel. If you don't like it here go home. How dare you ask for a blanket. The day she heard herself saying that last one she knew something terrible was happening, but by now the terrible thing, as terrible as a death, felt quite far away, as if not really happening to her." She breaks up with her boyfriend, Josh, who tells her that her job is "the epitome of excrement", which only helps to uphold the illusion "that keeping people out is what it's all about".

Yet she bonds with Florence, and we wonder if this is a turning-point. But no, soon she's dobbing the youngster in, and once back at the IRC, she is totally doing the security thing, shunning the slightly nicer members of staff, and hanging out with Russell, the "custody officer" with the least amount of humanity about him.

Still, she has retained Florence's Hot Air book, a notebook of jottings in which the girl puts together newspaper clippings and online compilations and meditations. (We have by now realized, of course, that a lot of the little collage-like inserts to which we've been privy from the beginning come from this little book.) We're told: "Invariably, [Brittany] ends up feeling bad when she looks at the Hot Air book." So perhaps there's still hope. Then again, maybe not. She still gets angry about Scottish Gaelic: "Different languages shouldn't be allowed in England. Britain. She meant Britain."

And, remember, Brittany stands for Britain: "The subtext is clear: the nation, much like SA4A officer Brittany Hall, is gripped by its unending complicity in everyday violence, but too tired and self-involved to really be spurred into action." This reviewer is even more pointed: "A true Brit, she absorbs the cruelty around her, deflects agency and privately absolves herself and her atrocities, even as it erodes her inner world, even with the knowledge that what is done cannot be undone." In fairness, we need to add: It's not just Britain...

Nevertheless, the novel closes with another of Florence's pieces. And Florence always represents hope: "April the anarchic, the final month, of spring the great connective. Pass any flowering bush or tree and you can't not hear it, the buzz of the engine, the new life already at work in it, time's factory."



***

This was very readable. Smith is always thought-provoking and engaging. And she observes our current extraordinary state very astutely. Sam Jordison is critical: "Brexit has brought division and anger. Social media companies don’t have our best interests at heart. Refugees are treated appallingly. 'Facts' have been undermined. People in power say the the truth is not the truth. Dreadful jokes are made about Muslim women in newspaper columns. And so on. You don’t need me to tell you any of this stuff." And you don't need a novel to tell you either, he continues...

I disagree. This kind of novel very effectively holds up a mirror to reality. When you see the stupid state of the world as a piece of art, you're more shocked -- more taken aback -- than you are when you read about it in newspaper columns.

Having said that, I feel that Smith often exemplifies the idea that it's easier to talk about hell than about heaven... Her struggling characters -- Richard, Brittany -- are very real. Her good characters are just too good to be true. Paddy, for example. Wise, generous, a kind of earth-mother. And Florence... She's too magic-realist to work for me. Brittany says to herself: "The girl is like someone or something out of a legend or a story, the kind of story that on the one hand isn't really about real life but on the other is the only way you ever really understand anything about real life. She makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world... She is good." But overwhelmingly good. Unrelatably good.

And, much as I applaud Florence's motives, I find myself irritated by her Lennon-like expositions. Example: "What if, the girl says. Instead of saying, this border divides these places. We said, this border UNITES these places. This border holds together these two really interesting different places. What if we declared border crossings places where, listen, when you crossed them, you yourself became doubly possible."

Yeah, sing it together: Wouldn't it be loverly...?

But then, as Florence says, "The machine only works because on the one hand humans make it work and on the other hand humans let it work." The answers are in our hands. The dysfunctional world we're seeing today is not something foreordained. It's the product of billions of choices, many of them our own.

And there are some real, in-your-face hits here. One of Florence's entries, for example -- where a migrant is talking about his face, and what it stands for in the various narratives that have accreted around him -- is lacerating: "My face is a breaking point... It's the face you see on dramas, films, or you picture in your head in the novels about people who aren't you, the books you read because you love literature, or to kill some free time, the ones that tell the stories that let you feel that you've felt, you've been really importantly moved, more, you've understood something major about the history, the politics, of the time you live in."

Ouch.

Overall, though, I'd agree with Justine Jordan that this episode of the Quartet is "more proselytising and polemical" than the previous ones, and sometimes these voices "don't quite lift into fiction".


The book begins: "Now what we don't want is Facts. What we want is bewilderment. What we want is repetition. What we want is repetition..." Different font sizes mean that certain phrases stand out like headlines: HOW DARE SHE/HOW DARE HE/HOW DARE THEY... We might know all this very well. But the bizarreness of it stands reiterating

***

I found the material about Rilke and Mansfield absolutely fascinating. And here's D.H. Lawrence again! You can't keep the man down... Rilke, it seems, was moved by D.H. Lawrence's The Rainbow, attesting that it opened up a new chapter in his life. Mansfield, meanwhile, was friends with Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, and some of her life story ended up in The Rainbow (Lawrence has form for this kind of thing...). So Rilke and Mansfield kind of met, in fictional form...


"Add to this," Smith writes, "what a picture postcard, depicting a myth -- Orpheus the mythical musician -- meant to R.M. Rilke... The great poems he wrote in 1922 were partly inspired or enabled by an image on a postcard that his lover pinned on the wall in his writing room... The slightness of it gestures against the odds. It is like a magic spell. And this in itself is very like the fact of those two writers just living in the same place at the same time in their lives, whether they met or not. This is the kind of coincidence that sends electricity through the truths of our lives. Our lives which often have what we might call a postcard nature"

As we've come to expect from the previous components of Smith's Quartet, the text has a Shakespearean parallel (here it's Pericles); a female artist (Tacita Dean); another Chaplin appearance; and a bit of Dickens (the story of Richard Doubledick, which shows, says Paddy, that things can change over time, and what seemed impossible at one time may well be possible at another -- which is true, but of course things may surprise us by becoming possible, without necessarily being good, as I'm sure many of us living in these times are daily finding...)

***

Take-aways:

-- Stories shape our lives. So, we need to be careful about the stories we tell about ourselves and others. Early in our acquaintance with Lease, there's a kind of meta-vibe going on, as he stands outside his suicidal self: "Look at him, storying his own absence. Storying his own dust. Stop it. He's a man leaning on a pillar in a station. That's all... He was a man on a railway platform. THERE WAS NO STORY. Except, there is. There always fucking is."

-- Rebecca Liu: "Spring, like much of Ali Smith’s work, is so full of other scintillating tangents and asides that a standard review could not possibly do justice (to call them 'tangents' and 'asides' also undermines the underlying message of the novel, which is that our world is constantly brought together by happy accidents, things that we see as separate are often linked, and that discussions of 'difference' can be a narcissistic distraction from the truth that we are small things living together in a greater thing)..."

So... Just Summer to go now...