“Spring“ by Ali Smith - review

 “Spring” by Ali Smith:

After Autumn and Winter, Spring is the third installment of this Seasonal Quartet, all stand-alone, separate but interconnected novels. Like in the previous novels, in a symphony of voices and references Spring is also permeated by contemporary politics. 

In Autumn, a wonderful inspiring novel with a manyfold of little stories about the absurdities of live, about friendship, art, life and death, the referendum for the Brexit was brought on its way.

Then in Winter, also sparkling with wit, insight and little stories galore, a rift between remainders and leavers went through society. Now, in Spring the world is in upheaval, conflict and climate change force people to leave their home and migrants are on their way across continents, countries and borders, and seek life elsewhere. As always Smith delights with wit, insight, playfulness and her sheer joy in creating narratives.

Smith often uses a piece of art or literature to get us into a specific state of mind, to set a tune or highlight a mood:

While Autumn caught the national shift of mood after the Brexit vote, it was also a story of impossible love and friendship across the generations between the worldly former songwriter of 101-years, Daniel Gluck, befriending the young, miserable girl Elizabeth. Art in this novel was represented by 60s pop artist Pauline Boty, colorful, playful and fleeting. 

In Winter, two estranged sisters who personify the rift in society between remainders and leavers, are changed by the appearance of the radiant girl Lux who helps thaw their icy Christmas gathering. Art here is represented by sculptor Barbara Hepworth, something solid to hold on to in difficult, shifting times. 

Now here, in Spring, with its main focus on the global migrant crisis and the abhorrent treatment of refugees, an artwork by Tacita Dean serves as a strong symbol of the avalanche which is coming towards us, set off by the impact of Brexit and climate change. It is the seven metre-wide chalk-on-blackboard drawing The Montafon Letter, a “picture of a mountain so huge that the wall became mountain and the mountain became a kind of wall”. 

Autumn explored age-old questions about the nature of time in a symphony of memories, dreams and transient realities: What is time, how do we subjectively and objectively experience it, how are we caught in our personal time bubble? And then in Winter this feeling of isolation turned almost insularly claustrophobic, telling a story of family dysfunction under one roof. But now Spring leaves this isolation and sets out on a tale of redemption and hope, brought on by a child outsider of magical, almost Jesus-like dimension. 

There are three main characters in Spring, who gradually understand their capacity to reinvent themselves and to escape their situation:

Richard Lease, a television director who last enjoyed popular success in the ’70s. He is grieving the recent death of his closest friend and work-collaborator Paddy, a clever, wise, witty, independent woman. Richard half-heartedly works on a new TV script, a cheap, sexed-up fictionalization about the writers Katherine Mansfield and Rainer Maria Rilke who apparently had been in the same locality in Switzerland once but personally never met. Then he meets Florence. Then he embarks on a newfound course towards healing and helping. 

Brittany Hall, a twenty-something woman who works as a Detainee Custody Officer in an Immigration Removal Centre just outside London. She feels dead and her life reduced by the racial violence at her work that is keeping refugees in detention. She is tired and run down by the complicity in everyday violence but then too self-involved, resigned and lazy to really do something about it. She is aware that “something terrible was happening“ but “as if beyond perspex“ it feels “quite far away“. Then she meets Florence. Then she embarks on a newfound course towards healing and helping.

And there is mysterious, precocious Florence, a 12-year-old schoolgirl who one day walks into the detention centre, bypassing guards like a ghost. In her refreshing, intelligent, straightforward youthfulness she takes both, Richard and Brittany, outside of their own lives and makes them grow. She meets Brittany on a train station platform in London and persuades her on the spot to ride a train with her to Scotland. Here they intercept the suicidal attempt of Richard who wants to throw himself in front of the train. Florence writes stories in a notebook which sometimes pop up in Spring. Like the girl Lux in Winter she is a purifying light for almost anyone she meets. She “humanizes the machine”, makes individuals remember their humanity which they forgot or lost in their daily-life’s struggles. “She makes people behave like they should, or like they live in a different better world. “

In a voice that really gets under the skin the prose of Spring is blunter, more explicit, more polemically embittered in its use of foul language, than that of its predecessors. The spirited writing is still light in style, much as in Autumn and Winter, but has become more stinging, reflecting news speech, social media troll hate speech and fake news talk. The tune is not as subtle anymore as in Autumn or Winter and serves in Spring as a weapon to open up cracks in our consciousness gone cold and frozen in a post-Brexit, fake news world. It shocks, hurts and then it redeems. It “humanizes the machine” and makes us at least think about the possibility to avoid further inurement to division, injustice and indifference. 

Despite the injustice and cruelty of which we are made painfully aware in this novel, this is a tale which, true to the spirit of Spring, the great connector, the bringer of new life, is an offering of hope.

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