And here’s another version of what was happening that morning, as if from a novel in which Sophia is the kind of character she’d choose to be, prefer to be, a character in a much more classic sort of story, perfectly honed and comforting, about how sombre yet bright the major-symphony of winter is and how beautiful everything looks under a high frost, how every glass blade is enhanced and silvered into individual beauty ………… a story in which there is no room for severed heads …. In which Sophia’s perfectly honed minor-symphony modesty and narrative decorum complement the story she’s in with the right kind of quiet wisdom-from-experience ageing-female status, making it a story that’s thoughtful, dignified, conventional in structure …. The kind of quality literary fiction where the slow drift of snow across the landscape is merciful …. The second in Ali Smith’s seasonal quartet, which started with the Booker shortlisted Autumn. The basic plot is an unusual family Christmas reunion – Art goes to visit his mother Sophia: a once successful business woman who ran businesses selling third world craft items and then artificially distressed furnishings, with her business now failed she still has her huge Cornish mansion – one which she first visited when it was occupied by a commune including her now estranged older sister Iris, a long time social activist and rebel. Art, an insincere nature blogger, has just broken up with his environmentally active girlfriend Charlotte – and pays a Croatian girl Lux he meets at a bus stop to impersonate Charlotte for the weekend. She invites Iris to join them. Sophia opens the book by looking at a postcard of Eduoard Boubat's "La Petite Fille Aux Feullies Mortes" - the same postcard that Daniel Gluck in "Autumn" sent to a younger lady called "Sophie something" on a visit to Paris. Daniel himself is not named in "Winter" but a comparison of incident's described in the two books from Daniel and Sophia's viewpoints respectively, make it clear that Daniel is in fact Art's father. https://www.artsy.net/artwork/edouard... However more so than the overlap of characters, “Winter” shares many similarities in style and approach, with its predecessor and it is clear that Smith is treating this quartet (at least on the evidence of its first two elements) as a single body of artistic work. Similarities I observed between the two books -An rhythmical opening chapter, clearly designed to be read aloud, with her the “All across the country … “ of Autumn replaced with “ ….. is dead” of Winter -The extensive use of wordplay and punning – and a character who delights in this and expanding other character’s appreciation of language, ironically (but presumably very deliberately given the immigration and Brexit ideas running through both books) in both cases a non-native English speaker. In Autumn, Daniel broadens the language of the young Elisabeth, in Winter Lux has a great grasp of English language and literature and her own name serves as a pun at one stage Lux/Lexiography. -A deliberate coverage of immediately contemporary events woven through the text (here – Grenfell Tower, Nicholas Soames “woofing” at a female labour MP in the commons, Theresa May’s “citizen of the world” speech, the crowdfunding by the far-right of a ship to block immigrant rescues) -A concentration on one overarching contemporary theme – with Trump being the Winter equivalent of Autumn’s Brexit vote -A distinct left-of-centre liberal bias to the political commentary, one which (in my view unfortunately in the days of social media echo-chambers) is only likely to reinforce rather than challenge the world view of Smith’s readers. You will look in vain for any criticism of Labour politicians for example. This isn’t a ghost story, though it’s the dead of winter when it happens, a bright sunny post-millennial global-warming Christmas (Christmas, too, dead) and it’s about real things really happening in the real world involving real people in real time on the real earth (uh huh, earth, also dead)
-A link between past political actions and the politics of today – part of the concept of seasonality that Smith set out to explore when she commenced the quartet – the concept that our real energy, our real history, is cyclic in continuance and at core, rather than consecutive and how closely to contemporaneousness a finished book might be able to be in the world, and yet how it could also be, all through, very much about stratified, cyclic time
In Autumn very deliberate parallels are drawn between the Profumo scandal and the Brexit vote – the concept of the lies of those in power.
In Winter, the environmental and climate-change activism of Charlotte (Art’s ex-girlfriend) and the refugee involvement of the modern day Iris are linked directly to the Silent-Spring inspired environmental activism of the commune where Iris lives many years before and her role in the Greenham Common protests.
Interestingly the message here is much more positive than Autumn, that the abuses of those in power can overtime be overcome by year’s of protest and activism.
Smith’s concept of cyclic time (and also perhaps the reason for the more positive take on events in this season) are bought together when Sophia is listening to Christmas music which … intrinsically means a revisiting. It means the rhythm of the passing of time, yes, but also, and more so, the return of time in its endless and comforting cycle to this special point in the year when regardless of the dark and the cold we shore up and offer hospitality and goodwill and give them out, a bit of luxury in a world primed against them both
- A cover featuring trees and with trees appearing as an image throughout the book. This is no coincidence, as in an interview on the significance of trees for the quartet Smith says
Trees are great. Don't get me started about how clever they are, how oxygen-generous, how time-formed in inner cyclic circles, how they provide homes for myriad creatures, how back when this country was covered in forests the word for sky was an old English word that meant tops of trees ... The sweetness they create. The things they help us create. The pollination they make possible, their utter (mellow) fruitfulness. Their gestural uprightness plus bendiness, their suppleness in all weathers. Their shelter. Their ingenuity with colours, and with looking after themselves seasonally. Their organic relation to books.
In Winter - the significance of trees is bound up with the importance of colour. Smith emphasises here that green (more specifically evergreen) is as much the colour of winter as white and also that green is an ancient colour (of moss and first) which pre-dates the other colours of nature.
Again I feel that this is a nod to the more optimistic parts of the season that this book is starting to
explore. I could not help seeing a link between the evergreen trees which maintain their colour through the winter months and the clear link Smith draws between the 70s Environmental protests, the Greenham common protests and the pro-immigrant and anti-climate change activism of the present day.
- A concentration on a certain decade: 1960s for Autumn, 1980s for Winter (although perhaps less coherently than in Autumn given that Hepworth died in the 1970s so that the 1980s actions is around people visiting her studio rather than Hepworth's own life in that time). I understand Spring will be 1920s based and Summer 1940s based.
-The firm SA4A (Smith, Ali, Quartet, Autumn) serving as a symbol for the threat of faceless and almost unknown multinationals. In Autumn, we see SA4A as a quasi-police private security firm, here Art works for their entertainments division to enforce copyright on emerging artists
-The symbolism of fences and commons – in Autumn Elisabeth’s mother is shocked by a fence erected on a common near her home (the fence serving a metaphor for Brexit), in Winter Iris chains herself to a fence at the very start of the Greenham Commons protests. I understand that for Smith one of the key stories in the book is the tale of the initial Greenham common protestors visiting a hardware store to buy chains and padlocks ........ and this set off for her the image of a chain reaction ... and her view that this initial small actions lead ultimately to nuclear disarmament.
-A lady struggling with high-street bureaucracy – here Autumn’s passport service of the Post Office is substituted by the financial advisers of high-street banks
-A relatively unknown and now female artist – here the sculptor Barbara Hepworth (in Autumn the pop-artist Pauline Boty). Both artists died tragically (Boty of cancer Hepworth of a fire in her studio) and both could be said to be (unfairly) overshadowed by men working in the same field and broad style (Warhol and Henry Moore respectively) – with Smith looking to deservedly restore their reputation.
As an aside I have to confess that for four years I attended a Cambridge college whose centrepiece was one of Hepworth's sculptures - Four Square (Walk Through) but that for years I falsely attributed the sculpture to Henry Moore (who also had a strong link to the college and was an honorary fellow)
https://barbarahepworth.org.uk/sculpt...
Finally it is fascinating to note that Barbara Hepworth was herself a founder member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
-A male character with a past link to that artist and who collected that art. Daniel with Pauline Boty here substituted by Art’s real father’s love of Barbara Hepworth: a pilgrimage to Cornwall to see the studio in which she lived and died, leads to him meeting Art’s mother
-Actual works of art of the artist figuring in the book and sparking a character’s imagination – in the same way Elisabeth looks at a book of Boty’s paintings, Art’s mother views a Hepworth sculpture (I believe “Nesting Stones”) owned by his father – more crucially she takes one of the two stones and brings it out from its hiding place in the present time
As an aside the concept of two nesting heads is a recurring one through the novel - Art as a child with Sophie, Lux with Art, Iris and Sophie as children and then later as adults
-The character’s reaction to the art serving as a very deliberate metaphor for what Smith is trying to do in her quartet.
In Autumn, Elisabeth comments on one of Boty’s paintings The cow parsley. The painted flowers. Boty’s sheer unadulterated reds in the re-image-ing of the image. Put it together and what have you got? Anything useful? which echoes a question Smith asked of herself in an interview as she started work on the concept We'll see what happens. I have no idea how the reality will meet the conception. I'm looking forward to finding out
In Winter, Sophia comments of the Hepworth sculpture It makes you walk around it, it makes you look through it from different sides, see different things from different positions. It’s also like seeing inside and outside something at once which is a perfect metaphor for how Smith's writing forces us to examine our world
-References to classic literature, including by Shakespeare and Dickens; in Autumn The Tempest and A Tale of Two Cities, here Cymbeline and A Christmas Carol.
-Set alongside the high-brow cultural references, the influence of TV light entertainment - in Autumn we had the game show and minor celebrity participant and clear Harry Hill influences; here Art’s step-father was a sitcom star and at times Smith explicitly references an imaginary sitcom studio audience reacting to the action of the book
-The mixing of the real and the imaginary and the mixing of time periods.
In Autumn much of the book is set in dreams, imagination or memory, and at times we are unclear even whose memory we are in or even how real the memories are –for example much of the dialogue between the young Elisabeth and Daniel may in fact be Daniel merging memories of his sister’s precocious wordplay.
In Winter there are numerous memories and flashbacks - but the real imaginary aspect is provided by two floating elements seen only by one character. Sophia has a floater which then turns into a child’s head, metamorphoses through an old man and a green man and then seems to ultimately transform into the stone that she has kept from Hepworth’s “Nesting Stones”. The disembodied head seems to have come to Smith as the concept of society “losing its head” I voting for Brexit, but I also thought the concept of a head acting alone from is body could apply to Trump.
More mysteriously Art sees a floating piece of coastline – possibly inspired by his sub-conscious guilt over a continual dream Charlotte had (and which was ignored by him) of quartering herself as a symbol for the possible break-up of Britain, possibly by her warning about the piece of coastline the size of Wales, imminently to break off the Antarctic shelf and possibly a nod to the inspiration Hepworth took herself from the North Yorkshire coastline of the family holidays of her childhood and which she later sought in the Cornish coast
-The concept of time-containers. When discussing the quartet, Smith commented But we're 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
In Autumn this concept was captured particularly in Daniel’s dreams and his memories of his fleeing from Nazi Germany and of his brilliant sister killed in the holocaust.
In Winter the concept is even more explicit. When discussing Art’s visions of the floating coastline, Lux explains what she calls her own coastline.
One of my mother’s uncles was doing the family three thing when I was about ten and he showed me my place on the map of people he’s made, I was down at the bottom, I looked at the names above mine, going back in time, all the centuries that the names meant and I thought look at all the people over my head, real people and all related to me, a part of me, and I know nothing, absolutely nothing, about almost all the people on that map …. When I was seventeen, walking along a street in Toronto … I knew for the first time what I was, I am , carrying on my head … not just one container or basket, but hundreds of baskets all balanced on each other, full to their tops with bones … and they were so heavy .. that either I was going to have to offload them or they were going to drive me down through the pavement to the ground
Later when saying farewell to Art and failing to persuade him to engage with his mother, she reacts to his assertion that he has nothing in common with Sophia with the angry comment
[we as humans have] the chance to know where we came from. To forget it, to forget what made us, where it might take us, it’s like, I don’t know. Forgetting your own head
Giving of course another explanation of the floating head – that it represents the dislocation of Art from his mother. And also interesting acting as partly a counter balance to the liberal, pro-immigration, anti-Brexit message of the story as Lux's argument partly picks up on David Goodhart's arguments in The Road to Somewhere: The Populist Revolt and the Future of Politics which ideas (much as I suspect Lux and Smith would hate to admit this) were behind May's citizen's of nowhere speech.
- The examination of dysfunctional parent/child relationships. In Autumn of course Elisabeth and her mother - but here not just Art and Sophia (as discussed above and critiqued by Lux) but between Sophia and her own father. In a beautifully touching but achingly sad vignette - Sophia's father contacts her when she is a successful business woman, when he hears that Laika the space dog only lived for a few hours, as he still remembers how upset the child Sophia was at Laika orbiting earth for a week before dying. Lux also reveals to Sophia that the effects of the Yugoslavian wars have left her family "war-wounded" such that she cannot live with them.
Overall I felt this was an outstanding novel and stronger than the already strong Autumn.
In particular I felt that the tale was more nuanced. I have already commented above on Lux's reflections on the need to understand where we have come from. Interestingly, over time the Brexit-supporting business-focused Sophia (with her childhood sensitivity and worries, her brief affair with Art's father and resulting exposure to the art of Hepworth and others, with her run-in with some form of security services) emerges as a much deeper and rounded individual than she is seen by Art and initially by the reader, whereas the left wing anti-Brexit, pro-refugee Iris emerges as simply a serial rebel and protestor.
Finally I feel that despite much of the despair Smith and the characters have with the contemporary world and politics - there is a quiet optimism building in this book, a hope that decency and goodness will prevail. The setting of the book, starting on the day of the Winter Solstice is important and Sophie one night reflects
the shift, the reversal, from increase of darkness to increase of light, revealed that a coming back of light was at the heart of midwinter equally as much as the waning of light
