~ Autumn, by Ali Smith ~
This is not going to be a plot-informed review, because this novel is not really about the plotline. Yes, I can tell you the protagonist is Elisabeth Demand, an art history lecturer, who lives with her mother and is close friends with her mother’s 101 year old neighbour, Daniel Gluck, whom she knew as a child. But this is really not the gist of the novel – the novel is all about the writing, and the writing is all about a particularly kind of consciousness and word play. For example, when Elisabeth, as a young child, first hears her mother telling Daniel about what Elisabeth had written about him:
Elisabeth was appalled. She was appalled from head to foot. It was like the notion of being appalled had opened its mouth and swallowed her whole.
p48-49
Smith’s novel contains a lot of political commentary, satire about systems (such as the post office systems of checking passport applications), as well as more pointed political commentary about neo-liberal democracies, gender inequalities, exercise of power, etc. And it is always told in Smith’s lyrical prose, that is so much like poetry:
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 looked up Google, what is EU? All across the country, people looked up Google: move to Scotland. All across the country, people looked up Google: Irish passport applications.
p59
The writing in this novel is original and luminous. It really does not need a plot. Yes, Elisabeth goes to visit Daniel in his nursing home weekly or more, and there is background story to his life, her life, her mother’s life, her mother’s present with new lover, Zoe. But this is all by the by – the real action here is the intelligence Smith is sharing, her unique take on a whole range of issues from memory to injustice to art.
And all with the background of autumn of course, as per the title:
“October’s a blink of the eye. The apples weighing down the tree a minute ago are gone and the tree’s leaves are yellow and thinning. A frost has snapped millions of trees all across the country into brightness. The ones that aren’t evergreen are a combination of beautiful and tawdry, red orange gold the leaves, then brown , and down.
The days are unexpectedly mild. It doesn’t feel that far from summer, not really, if it weren’t for the underbite of the day, the lacy creep of the dark and the damp at its edges, the plants calm in the folding themselves away, the beads of the condensation on the webstrings hung between things.
On warm days it feel wrong, so many leaves falling.
But the nights are cool to cold.
The spiders in the sheds and their houses are guarding their egg sacs in the roof corners.
The eggs for the coming year’s butterflies are tucked on the undersides of the grassblades, dotting the dead looking stalks on the wasteland, camouflaged invisible on the scrubby looked bushes and twigs.
p177-8
And that quote above is one chapter. That description is about as British-ly autumnal as it can get.
Thankfully, it is a slim and small book – because it is so condensed with images and intelligence a long book of this density would be near indigestible. This is a writing-gem. But it is the kind of writing which requires quite a lot from the reader; compactness which requires a lot of unpacking. So do read it, but not when in a hurry!
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