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I’d love to chat all day about the seasons but I’ve work to do, he said.

When I first read this book, I, along with many others, missed a key connection between it and the first volume of the quartet, Autumn. Reading Winter again now after just reading Autumn for the third time I firstly find it hard to believe we all missed that connection and secondly was delighted by how much knowing that connection changes the book (for the better). I won't, in case of spoilers, say what that connection is, but it has to do with a link between one of the main characters in each book and knowing that link makes Winter a different beast altogether. And far more enjoyable because of that.

Autumn was a collage, similar to the art work of Pauline Boty who featured heavily. Winter is also a collage, retaining the same format of leaping around in time. As Smith says,

That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.

And this compression or overlaying of time seems to be a key idea in the books.

But the artist of choice in Winter is Hepworth, famous for her statues with holes in them. So, it is perhaps appropriate that Art, one of the main characters, says at one point

So I think of him, and I think of the word father, and it’s kind of like there’s a cut-out empty space in my head. I quite like it. I can fill it any way I like. I can leave it empty.

And we, as readers who know something about Art that he does not know himself, can relate to what Smith has someone say about Hepworth

Yes, he says, and she does that, Hepworth, I think, puts the holes through what she makes, because she wants people to think about exactly what you just said, time, and ancient things, but also because she really just wants them to want to touch what she makes, you know, to be reminded about things that are quite physical, sensory, immediate, he says.

Art's statement about his father means something more to us, or at least something different.

Having read Autumn and Winter back to back over the last 2-3 days, I am inordinately excited about the upcoming release of Spring (which is why I have re-read these first two) because my re-reads have definitely given me more of picture of what Smith is doing overall in her quartet (the way she is compressing and overlaying time, the way she is drawing parallels between past and present, the way...) and because the brief comments I have seen about Spring (I am trying to avoid them, but some sneak through) suggest this starts to come to fruition in the next volume.

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ORIGINAL REVIEW
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Ok, so I am biased and it may be that Ali Smith gets an extra star simply for being Ali Smith. But, even then, when you stop to consider what Smith has done in this second book of her seasonal quartet, it is breathtaking! Ali Smith has her own unique style. Given her very obvious love for Dickens and all things Dickensian, I wanted to say her style is Smithsonian, but someone else has already appropriated that word. No one writes like Smith with such joy in words.

At the Man Booker short list event in Cheltenham, Smith spoke about the difficulties of time in the novel. In a piece of music, several people can sing at the same time, and about different topics/times if that’s what the composer wants. In a novel, we can only read one set of words at a time. And this is a frustration for some novelists.

In Winter, Smith plays with this idea of time in a novel. This makes for a fairly complicated structure to the book which consists of multiple flashbacks and flash forwards. It can be tricky to keep track of all the different threads being covered.

That’s one of the things stories and books can do, they can make more than one time possible at once.

Well, they can when Smith writes them.

We are dealing with four main characters: Sophia, her sister, Iris, her son Art (Arthur) and a girl Art has paid to pretend to be his girlfriend for Christmas with his mother, Lux. Art needs a girlfriend because he has just broken up with Charlotte who was supposed to be spending Christmas with him at his mother’s, but she is now, instead, sabotaging his Twitter feed to such an extent that he dares not turn on his phone.

Lux is a fascinating character (somewhat reminiscent of Amber in The Accidental who arrives and disrupts a family occasion). Lux is, of course, both the bringer of light and a soap. And in this story the girl called Lux brings both illumination and cleansing. She is not British, but she came to the UK because of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline.

Cymbeline, he says. The one about poison, mess, bitterness, then the balance coming back. The lies revealed. The losses compensated.

And that’s what Winter is about. Sophia and Iris have fallen out and not spoken for many years. Art has broken up with Charlotte. Then Lux happens.

And, in the mix with this story of a family gathering (Christmas is in Winter and Christmas is about family gatherings), Smith flashes back and forwards to earlier times in Sophia’s and Iris’s history. Primarily, amongst many other historical references, she visits the Greenham Common protests and pulls them forward to today.

It seems to me that one of the things Smith is trying to do in her quartet is ground or embed the events and attitudes of our current time in their underlying history. She wants to unite “now�� and “then�� because “now�� means very little unless you understand “then��. In Winter, “now�� very much is “now��: we cover events up to the summer of 2017.

Brexit and its implications are still part of the story (Christmas and “no room at the inn�� is paralleled with UK and “no more room��). Trump is part of the story.

And, as with Pauline Boty in Autumn, there is a female artist. In Winter this artist is perhaps mentioned fewer times or in less detail, (Update: this comment comes from my ignorance of Hepworth - some basic research after reading shows that she is actually present, if not named, from the very beginning) but her role in the overall aim of the story is very clear. She is Barbara Hepworth:

Yes, he says, and she does that, Hepworth, I think, puts the holes through what she makes, because she wants people to think about exactly what you just said, time, and ancient things, but also because she really just wants them to want to touch what she makes, you know, to be reminded about things that are quite physical, sensory, immediate, he says.

Hepworth’s work is like what Smith is aiming for (and, for me, achieving) in the way she seeks to unite past and present. In a comment on Hepworth, there is a quote that it seems to me applies equally to Smith’s writing:

She walks round the sculpture. It makes you walk round 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

And also in a comment that could apply equally to Smith’s writing, we read of Kepler

Kindred means family, what I’m saying is he thought that truth and time are sort of related, family to each other.

And

And he was a man who paid things attention up close as well as far away.

Winter contains far more meditation on the season it is named after than Autumn did.

That’s what winter is: an exercise in remembering how to still yourself then how to come pliantly back to life again.

…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.

I could write for hours about this book, but I cannot do it justice and the best thing is if you read it for yourself. Everyone should read it, especially the final quarter which made me laugh and cry in equal measure. One final quote which really made me laugh:

The man who wrote the dictionary. Johnson. Not Boris. The opposite of Boris. A man interested in the meanings of words, not one whose interests leave words meaningless.

And I haven’t even talked about the floating head or the floating coastline.