Ali Smith: Spring — Julian Girdham

January 31st was a perfect day to start the third of Ali Smith's seasons quartet, Spring. I hadn't planned that, but found myself on the eve (technically - surely February isn't really spring?) starting the book, and plunging straight into its vivid angry Brexit-fuelled first pages as the clock ticked down to the UK leaving the EU at 11pm that night.

There are lots of pleasures here: the story of TV and film director Richard Lease's enduring love for one woman, now dead; the sharpness of Smith's writing on immigration; the parallels with one of Shakespeare's late Romances, Pericles. Also in the mix is Florence (flowers, spring), a 12 year-old girl who moves magically through the text like a character from one of those Shakespeare Romances and changes the life of Brit (again, the name), cynical and worn-down from her awful job in an immigration centre. Also: Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke in 1922 in the same Swiss town, unaware of each other, and Charlie Chaplin, and a four-page burn on tech companies:

We want the best for you. We want to make the world more connected. We want you to feel the world is yours. We want you to see the world through us …

As with the first two novels, a female artist is the presiding spirit (earlier, Pauline Boty and Barbara Hepworth). Tacita Dean’s massive work The Montafon Letter (2017) features in a hinge moment in the novel, as Richard and a young woman gaze at it in awe. This Royal Academy article makes Dean’s approach seem very like Smith’s:

Dean’s subjects typically arrive via a winding road of research full of unanticipated diversion and accident. She is motivated by curiosity, by her not knowing rather than by her predetermined intention. “I’ve always liked her lateralism – the way she comes at things,” Tim Marlow tells me. “If there’s a straight path between one point and another, she’ll question why it’s necessary to take that journey, and will find a different way to it, and will find interesting things along the way.”

‘The Montafon Letter’ encapsulates the underlying sense of dread through the book, but also suggests some hope, the spirit of spring that surfaced in the book in human connections and kindness. Dean’s work is about

a sequence of avalanches in 17th-century Austria that buried some people, then buried the priest who went to officiate at the site of the burial, then – finally – unburied the priest, still alive. Dean says in some ways it’s about Brexit, which she finds devastating, and about hope – “hope that the last avalanche will uncover us”.

Spring ends, appropriately, on a positive note. April is

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.

Winter and Autumn were also fascinating. It will be interesting to see what these books, written out of the heat of immediate events in British culture, will look like in 20 years' time. Without that perspective, all we can say for the moment is that they are unique responses to the world today: complex, agile, rangy, funny, surprising and intellectually dazzling. I can’t wait for Summer.

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Further: an excellent interview by Amy E. Elkins in the LA Review of Books:

While I’ve been working on these books named after the seasons, the long wall of my study has pretty much by itself become a collage space for anything and everything I think it’ll be good to have in my sightline for the book I’m working on… I think what I like best is how objects and images resonate on their own. Then when you put them beside other objects or images, they do what narrative does when two things come together in it, they make a third, they cocktail together to produce their own new thing or narrative.