Volume three of Smith’s Seasonal Quartet offers a powerful vision of lost souls in a divided Britain
Following on from 2016’s Autumn and 2017’s Winter, the third novel in Ali Smith’s projected quartet is named after the season of new life, but it’s a bleaker, darker book than its predecessors. Written and published at speed, all three have tacked close to current events; the divisions crystallised by the EU referendum that opened Autumn have only hardened over the past three years, while beyond our small island conflict and climate change force ever more people from their homes. And yet, fittingly for a writer who over a quarter-century career has relished contradiction and oxymoron, the novel gradually reveals its kernel, like a seed unfurling in darkness, to be one of hope. “True hope,” one character says, is “actually the absence of hope.”
Smith’s genius in these three books has been to use art and literature to navigate through the froth of the present moment with such a light touch that she rarely seems to lecture. Autumn caught the national shift of mood after the Brexit vote, but it was also a story of impossible love and life-defining friendship across the generations, introducing the reader to neglected 60s pop artist Pauline Boty, whose works blaze with colour and fun. In Winter, inept nature blogger Art spent Christmas with his elderly mother Sophia and her estranged sister Iris, with charismatic visitor Lux bringing light and warmth to the chilly family dynamic. Arch-capitalist Sophia and Greenham Common veteran Iris personified not only the national standoff between leavers and remainers, but also the long, intimate wars of siblinghood. “I hate you.” “I hate you too,” the two old women tell each other fondly as they snuggle down to sleep. In a merrily surreal tale that featured the bobbing disembodied head of a child and a piece of cliff hanging in the air, the highlighted artist was Barbara Hepworth, her sculptural forms something literally to hold on to in troubled times.
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