What a rich little mouthful this short novel is...

It's by Ali Smith; it was published in 2016 (the year of the Brexit vote); and I didn't totally take to it at first. We open with a dreamlike sequence in which we're not quite sure whether or not our protagonist is dead. Fresh from The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, I thought he was. But no, he's still with us. Just. His name is Daniel Gluck, and he's 101. He's in a care home. And he's in the "increased sleep period" that generally -- or so the experienced care home folks say -- indicates that death is imminent. Daniel's sleeping-before-the-big-sleep mind produces the usual dreamlike mishmash of past experiences and vivid scenes. He's on a beach; he's in the woods; he's back on the beach. The pictures he experiences are peaceful, beautiful, playful, reflecting a man who -- we later learn -- was curious, cosmopolitan, and artistic. But then he sees dead bodies on his beach, not far from where other people are holidaying, apparently oblivious to the corpses: "Daniel Gluck looks from the death to the life, then back to the death again. The world's sadness. Definitely still in the world."

The whole sequence makes for a slightly disconcerting beginning.

Then we cut to our other protagonist, a 32-year-old woman called Elisabeth Demand, who's struggling to get her passport application pre-vetted at the local Post Office. Anyone who has done anything remotely bureaucratic in the United Kingdom recently will immediately identify with so many elements of this scene... The long, erratic queues; the graunchy, unstable seats; the unreasonable requests; the pernickety attention to tedious detail... (Elisabeth's application is rejected first off, because her head is not in exactly the right position on the photo, and a second time because her eyes were -- ditto; but instead of following the universal advice to get them redone at Snappy Snaps, she risks sending the application in regardless. In a later scene she's trying to register with the doctor, during which process she's asked to produce a utility bill, that hoary old chestnut of Mad Penpushers the world over.) So that's all very funny, if also tragic.

And the little story just carries on expanding outwards, zooming backwards and forwards in time, as it fills in bits of Daniel's and Elisabeth's backstories, and explains how, years ago, they came to develop their very beautiful friendship (which, despite the early misgivings of Elisabeth's mother, Wendy, is utterly innocent), and how the societies they have both known have shifted and changed over the years.

Anyway, a bit more nitty-gritty, and then I'll note some of the themes that interested me. I knew nothing of Ali Smith until I was following up on Douglas Stuart and his Booker-winning Shuggie Bain. Mentioned in several places was this other Scottish-born author, who had been short-listed for the Booker no fewer than four times (including once for Autumn).

Autumn is the first in Smith's Seasonal Quartet. It's sparklingly erudite, but it manages its rich tapestry of history and culture lightly and unpretentiously. I listened to an audio-version, and although it was really well read (by Melody Grove, whose voice is as pretty as her name), it's another of those books (like Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous) that is so rich, textually, that you need more time to take it in than you really have when you're listening. There's lots of word play, for example. Additionally, the time travel -- "Time travel IS real, Daniel said. We do it all the time. Moment to moment, minute to minute" -- is a bit harder to cope with via aural channels. And it's the kind of book where ideas and themes bounce off each other like billiard balls. You'd need a map to keep track of everything... So I ended up borrowing a copy from the Internet Archive to check back on some of the details.


The Brexit referendum vote took place on 23 June 2016. Having left the shores of the British Isles a long time ago, we had no influence on events. In fact, we were in Mongolia at the time...

Resonant ideas:

1. Friendship and love

Daniel lives next door to Elisabeth and her mother. A former jingle-writer, and already old even when she is a child, he often acts as an informal baby-sitter. Elisabeth is drawn to him by a number of factors: The art with which he surrounds himself; the way he takes her seriously; the way he uses words; the way he encourages her to think differently, and reject cliche and simplification... He obviously enjoys feeding the imagination of this bright child, and his standard question, all through their relationship, is: "What are you reading?" He exemplifies the meaning of education. (Elisabeth later becomes an educator herself, teaching art history at a university in London. She has one of those tenuous positions -- as a no-fixed-hours, casual-contract junior lecturer -- that abound in academia these days, but you get the impression she's good at what she does.)

Once she has grown up and moved off to university, they lose touch (although Daniel remains the conversational gold standard for Elisabeth, which her boyfriends find it hard to match). And then she finds out Daniel has signed himself into a nursing home. As Edmonds points out: "Elisabeth, who for much of the book had been estranged from Daniel, sits with him on the book's final pages. He wakes from one of his long slumbers, blinks as if no time has passed, and asks Elisabeth, 'What are you reading?' And because we readers have been paying attention, we know that he means I love you and I want to be moved by what moves you."

Wendy starts out a somewhat flattening character. She encourages Elisabeth to take short cuts with her school assignments, and constantly interrogates her about her relationship with Daniel (single parents are probably doubly prey to worry). But Wendy finds love and friendship in the unlikely context of one of those antiques programmes with which British TV is riddled. And love helps her to find her political mojo too.



2. Time

I've mentioned the time-shifts that are such an integral part of the novel. Smith pushes back against the way we are railroaded into looking at time as linear. She resists the chronologies we apply -- and others apply -- to our lives, so that they start at birth, end at death, and fulfil "some or other of life's usual expectations" in the middle. Instead, she says, we should see ourselves as "time-containers": "We hold all our diachrony, our pasts and our futures (and also the pasts and futures of all the people who made us and who in turn we'll help to make), in every one of our consecutive moments/minutes/days/years, and I wonder if our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core, rather than consecutive."

That's a very resonant idea, I think. It certainly captures what this blog is all about. Rather than preceding in a thematically or chronologically or stylistically orderly fashion, it jumps about wildly, influenced by other things I've read along the way, or by memories, or by things I'm experiencing, or by hopes for the future.

Daniel embodies diachrony. His pre-death dreams swirl around the people and experiences that have formed him, and yet, even sleeping, he continues to influence the people in his vicinity.



3. Britain after Brexit

Autumn is regularly billed as "the first post-Brexit novel". And indeed the pages are redolent of that peculiar time, when a terrible lack of compassion and dialogue seemed to seep into the country's bones.

Parodying Dickens, Smith opens by telling us: "It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature." (Later, reading to Daniel, Elisabeth recites Dickens's actual opening lines.)

Smith also has a long riff laying out the contradictions of life at that point: "All across the country, people felt it was the wrong thing. All across the country, people felt it was the right thing. All across the country, people felt they’d really lost. All across the country, people felt they’d really won. All across the country, people felt they'd done the right thing and other people had done the wrong thing... All across the country, people felt legitimized. All across the country, people felt bereaved and shocked... All across the country, people said it wasn't that they didn't like immigrants. All across the country, people said it was about control... All across the country, the usual tiny per cent of the people made their money out of the usual huge per cent of the people... All across the country, the country was divided..."


We found out the result of the Brexit vote only two days later, on 25 June, via a British couple who became next-door-ger-neighbours

The tirades against immigrants intensify (who will staff care homes like Daniel's, Elisabeth wonders...). But there is also pushback: "As she passes the house with GO and HOME still written across it she sees that underneath this someone has added, in varying bright colors, WE ARE ALREADY HOME THANK YOU and painted a tree next to it and a row of bright red flowers beneath it. There are flowers, lots of real ones, in cellophane and paper, on the pavement outside the house, so it looks a bit like an accident has recently happened there."

A mysterious three-metre-tall, double-layer fence, complete with security cameras, razor wire, and electrification, appears on common land near Wendy's house. I don't think we're specifically told what it's for. We can only surmise. But it's after she hears a news item about the plan to house asylum-seeker children in "the same high-security places they put everybody" that Wendy starts to vandalize the fence. Earlier, she tells Elisabeth: "I'm tired of the news. I'm tired of the way it makes things spectacular that aren't, and deals so simplistically with what's truly appalling. I'm tired of the vitriol. I'm tired of the anger. I'm tired of the meanness. I'm tired of the selfishness. I'm tired of how we're doing nothing to stop it... I'm tired of the violence there is and I'm tired of the violence that's on its way, that's coming, that hasn't happened yet.... I'm tired of lying governments. I'm tired of people not caring whether they're being lied to any more."

Setting off this aspect of the story, like a larger-than-life shadow, are the snippets of Daniel's life that come to us in roundabout ways. His was a divided family. His sister, five years younger, lived in France with their mother (he's her "summer brother"). We hear of Hannah Gluck, in 1943, being rounded up in Nice with several other women, and stuck on the back of a truck. Hannah climbs off the truck. We don't know what happens to her after that. It's the last time she is mentioned by name.

We learn, via a staff member in Daniel's home, of another little piece of his past: "We were all amazed, the care assistant says, when he told us about in the war, when they interned him. Him being English really but going in there with his old father the German, even though he could have stayed outside if he'd chosen. And how he tried to get his sister over, but they said no... When the state is not kind, he said. We were talking about the vote, it was coming up, I've thought about it a lot, since. Then the people are fodder, he said."

So true, so perennially true: When the state is not kind, then the people are fodder...

In addition to that bit of historical context, we also have the 1960s. Running through the narrative like a bright thread is the work of painter and collagist Pauline Boty (1938-66), a toweringly talented figure, who died tragically young, and has since been subject to long periods of neglect, largely on gendered grounds (as Elisabeth muses: "Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered again years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered at infinitum"). And then there's Christine Keeler, "one of the witting/unwitting agents of the huge changes in the class and sexual mores of the 1960s". I was too young to understand anything of what was going on at the time, but even as a child, I picked up on the frisson that surrounded news in which she figured.

We're always poised on the threshold of revolutionary change, Smith seems to be telling us. Dickens's best-of-times-worst-of-times; the Gluck family's experiences of the Holocaust; Brave New World, the book that accompanies Elisabeth's endless wait at the Post Office; Keeler and Boty, as they challenge power and convention in their different ways. But we're also always poised on the threshold of forgetfulness... Constantly subjecting ourselves corporately to the task of reinventing the wheel.


Politics, Mongolian-style

4. Art, colour, and hope

Pauline Boty is one of the powerful factors linking Elisabeth and Daniel. And she injects splurges of colour into the book. Boty, Smith tells us in the novel, was a "free spirit ... equipped with the skill and the vision capable of blasting the tragic stuff that happens to us all into space, where it dissolves away to nothing whenever you pay any attention to the lifeforce in her pictures". Kristen Evans maintains: "In many ways, Smith’s novel can be read as an argument that art matters -- especially in times of political upheaval."

Wendy plans to do her bit of resistance by hurling items she has bought from the local junk shop against the hated fence ("bombarding that fence with people's histories and with the artefacts of less cruel and more philanthropic times", as Smith puts it). Evans continues: "Art can transform, talk back, and turn vandalism into a beautiful message. It connects historical and cultural moments that might otherwise be left untethered."

I'm not far enough into Sarah Bakewell's At the Existentialist Cafe to comment with any degree of authority, but this sounds somehow very existentialist... Jean-Paul Sartre's character Roquentin, hero of Nausea, saw art as the way out of "contingency", the random, viscous chaos of life that sucks us down. Art offers this handhold because it is the producer of "necessity", a state in which each element leads to the next, and none can be otherwise. Because (in this case) the song he hears has necessity, it offers Roquentin's existence necessity too. Art is capable both of capturing things as they are, then, and of giving them an inner necessity or coherence. They no longer induce vertigo; rather, they make sense. (Smith also seems to share with Sartre a fascination with trees...)



And because life constantly throws up artistic rebels (even if they're only small-scale rebels, and even if their contribution to art is teeny-tiny) -- Daniel, Hannah, Elisabeth, Wendy, Boty -- there is the constantly recurring possibility of bringing tiny pieces of deliberateness into the chaos of uncertainty that surrounds us. And that's what gives us a little bit of hope.

The end of the novel goes like this:

"November again. It's more winter than autumn. That's not mist. It's fog...
"The furniture in the garden is rusting. They've forgotten to put it away for the winter.
"The trees are revealing their structures. There's the catch of fire in the air. All the souls are out marauding. But there are roses, there are still roses. In the damp and the cold, on a bush that looks done, there's a wide-open rose, still.
"Look at the colour of it."



*_*_*

Autumn is a book that seems to have divided critics. Edmonds recalls that her book club "summarily dismissed it", whereas she "experienced the novel as a rare instance of aesthetic sublimity, as the right book at the right time"; James Wood describes this and its successor, Winter, as "brief and almost breezy..., quick, witty reads eager to have their say on the very latest news" (Autumn doesn't read like this to me at all; rather I feel a melancholy hanging over everything, a sense of things changing, irrevocably; the world is a sunny beach where the dead bodies are never too far away...); this blogger is a little dubious. Yet for Joanna Kavenna, it is "a beautiful, poignant symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities".

I'm all up for continuing the Seasonal Quartet (although I will read next time, rather than listen). It ticks my boxes: It's atmospheric and lyrical; it's politically and socially observant; and it teaches me lots...