Less than four months after the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union in 2016, Autumn, by Ali Smith, was published. Unlike most of the previous work of the Man Booker-nominated Scottish author, it had a deliberately fast turnaround as it aimed to be the first in what Smith dubs a “Seasonal Quartet” set in the aftermath of the Brexit vote. The plot follows next-door neighbours Daniel Gluck and Elisabeth Demand, now one hundred and one and thirty-two years old respectively, who first bonded when Elisabeth was a child enthralled by Daniel’s descriptions of works of art.
Fiction that tackles the political, particularly the immediately political, often tends to be crude and without nuance. Clearly Smith was out when this particular carrier pigeon landed, because she deals deft and magisterial prose with intelligent and perceptive political truths. Daniel and Elisabeth’s stories are told with the referendum result pulsing in the background which luminously backlights the storytelling rather than detracting from it.
Smith has subsequently released two more novels in this quartet, Winter and Spring, which are similarly moving, but for me nothing can match the unrestrained beauty of Autumn. I may be biased: the cover is emblazoned with David Hockney’s Early November Tunnel, a painting of his beloved Yorkshire Wolds that I grew up next to. A major subplot explores the work of Pauline Boty, who happens to be one of my favourite painters. But I still think it would be impossible to read Autumn and not feel that it speaks to you directly.
I will unashamedly compare Ali Smith to Charles Dickens: where Dickens was a chronicler of the collective conscious of the Victorian era, Smith articulates a collective unconscious of our endlessly fascinating and puzzling lives and times. You can hear society breathing in her writing. Autumn exists in the liminal spaces: between right and wrong, summer and winter, leave and remain.
