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This is England

Autumn is the first instalment of Ali Smith’s ‘seasonal quartet�� - a cycle ‘exploring the subjective experience of time, questioning the nature of time itself'. Triggered to read it by the title �� autumn is my favourite season �� this first episode was a wondrous introduction to Smith’s writing for me. Awaiting, anticipating, wondering about the next episodes to come �� which characters would return, which artists Ali Smith would spotlight - was an integral part of the marvellous and exhilarating experience that was reading the entire cycle in order of appearance.

Autumn is a playful, multi-layered and at times delectably subversive novel on the floating of time, aging, identity, art, love and friendship, grounded knee-deep in the grim realities of today’s post-truth politics, against the backdrop of the aftermath of the Brexit-vote.

Set right here, right now, the story time-travels back and forth between the past and the present. Since primary school, Elisabeth, now 32 and an art history lecturer, and her next-door neighbour, Daniel Gluck, about 70 years her senior, are close friends. Both soulmates are bruised - Elisabeth is fatherless and Daniel is alone. From flashbacks and dreams, we learn from their childhood and past. While Daniel �� a collector of ‘arty art�� - has awakened Elisabeth’s sensibility to art and honed her skills of critical thinking, encouraging her to be a girl ‘reading the world��, Elisabeth now spends hours next to his bed while he dozes off in a care home, reading Shakespeare and Huxley to him.

What you reading? Always be reading something, he said. Even when we’re not physically reading. How else will we read the world? Think of it as a constant.

Smith parallels two key moments in recent history and present day UK by connecting them both to dishonesties in politics, suggesting these lies had critical impact on society, the Brexit vote and the Profumo Scandal of 1963. She astutely smuggles the latter into the novel by interlacing the scandal and the life of her main characters, Daniel and Elisabeth, with the vibrant and tragically short life of Pauline Boty (1938-1966), the only female representative artist in British Pop Art, whose legacy is continuously oscillating between oblivion and rediscovery. Pauline Boty used a shot of the famous chair photograph series by Lewis Morley of the women at the heart of the Profumo scandal, Christine Keeler, in a collage painting which has been mysteriously missing soon after she had painted it, Scandal ��63.





To say the least, these lies make people sick: She hadn’t known that proximity to lies, even just reading about them, could make you feel so ill. By showing the effect of lies by the powerful on society, how they divide people and infuriate them, Smith makes one ponder on the significance of truth. Is there really anything new under the sun in this acrimonious year of the prevalence of post-truth politics? Or it is just an illustration of the unchangeable nature of power and the corroded order of things?

By reviving feminist artist Pauline Boty, Smith thematises the position of women in modern art. Some titles of Boty’s paintings, like ‘It’s a man’s world�� speak volumes in that respect. Smith’s Boty proclaims I am a person. I’m an intelligent nakedness. An intellectual body. I’m a bodily intelligence. Art’s full of nudes and I’m a thinking, choosing nude. I’m the artist as nude. I’m the nude as artist��.. This assertion reminded me of the mission statement of the Guerrilla Girls, a feminist group denouncing discrimination, tracking and keeping statistics on the representation of female artists in museums. Art still is a man’s world, to a very high extent.



However obvious Smith’s sympathies in the debate, do not expect pure doom and gloom. Instead of wallowing in woeful defeatism, the characters shine in heart-warming and infectious combativeness and witty insurgence. The Kafkaesque scenes at the post office resemble absurdist sketches, while they are at the same time a virulent critique on the ridiculously bureaucratic demands regulation imposes on people - and on a society that turns a blind eye to the homeless which have to shelter in public buildings, without anyone blinking.

The energetic pace of the writing, brimming with jocular wordplay, literary references and puns smoothly coincides with the melancholic undercurrent of this novel, as Autumn breathes an atmosphere of transience. People die, at young age. Everything is temporary, like the leaves falling in autumn. Entering history equals finding ‘endless sad fragility��:

Elisabeth had last come to the field just after the circus had left, especially to look at the flat dry place where the circus had had its tent. She liked doing melancholy things like that. But now you couldn’t tell that any of these summer things had ever happened. There was just an empty field. The sports tracks had faded and gone. The flattened grass, the places that had turned to mud where the crowds had wandered round between the rides and the open-sided trucks of the driving and shooting games, the ghost circus ring: nothing but grass.

Il faut reculer pour mieux sauter. Perhaps one could say that Ali Smith in a way indulges in facile preaching to the choir, mollycoddling the right-minded citizens mourning the present state of the world. But why not just delight in her eloquently phrased discourse and lithe sentences, nodding approvingly while licking one’s wounds instead of sinking into despair? Fite dem Back.

I thank NetGalley, Penguin and Ali Smith for granting me an ARC.