The Nature of Things

Third in Ali Smith's remarkable seasonal series of novels comes Spring . All three of the books have been timely, the action in them occurring almost in the time frame in which we read them. The action here is mostly in October 2018. Considering the time it takes to write a book - the drafting, the revision, the editing, and finally the publication - how does she manage to do that? The books are very much of this political era, the post-Brexit vote in the UK and the post-2016 presidential election in the US, and this book deals cogently and in white-hot passion with the monstrous treatment of immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers. The opening line of Spring is, "Now what we don't want is facts" and thus Smith sums up very succinctly the governing strategy of the moment. Facts are not really facts but are whatever you can get people to believe. Truth is malleable and waiting to be shaped by the master propagandists. This is the background for the stories she tells ...

"God was dead." These are the words with which Ali Smith begins the second in her seasonal fiction series, Winter . And not only was God dead; so were a lot of other things that had been taken for granted. This is the Brexit/Trump era and the world has gone wrong. The truth is turned on its head. Winter is no longer winter; it is a shortened lukewarm interlude. The first book in this series, Autumn , was the first book that I read last year and I loved it. This book is not a sequel in the sense that it uses the same characters as vehicles to tell the story. These are entirely new characters and new relationships to explore, but the time period is still the present in England and people are still as unsettled and anxious. As one of the characters opines: “The people in this country are in furious rages at each other after the last vote, she said, and the government we’ve got has done nothing to assuage it and instead is using people’s rage for its own political expediency. Whi...

I finished this book a couple of days ago but just couldn't immediately think what to say about it in a review. I wasn't even sure how I felt about it. It really was unlike anything I had ever read before.  After giving it much thought - and there truly is a lot to think about here - I came to the conclusion that the book is brilliant. The more I thought about it the more I liked it. In that, I found myself in agreement with the Man Booker Prize committee which shortlisted the book for 2017. Autumn is the first in a planned series of four books named after the seasons, but you would be wrong to think of the books as related to Earth's seasons. Instead, it would seem that they will be more about the seasons of our lives, what time is and how we experience it. This book explores pop culture and its influence on our lives and how the present is informed by the past. I'm once again reminded of William Faulkner's quote from Requiem for a Nun : "The past is never de...