Summer is the last in Smith’s Seasonal Quartet, all independent novels which nevertheless work together as a collage or symphony of overarching complex connections of voices and narratives that reflect our contemporary life.
In October 2016 Autumn was released, the first installment of this Seasonal Quartet. With it the shocking, inhumane events of the past four years had begun. There was Brexit, there was Donald Trump, there was migration, refugees and injustice, social upheaval and climate change. There was the pandemic and the lockdown. The latter two blend seamlessly in with Smith’s concern with isolation, community, migrants, refugees and the many ways of depriving people of their freedom. Against this political background Smith explores the personal experiences of many of her interesting, vivid, endearing characters. The Quartet’s concern is not primarily political but individual, personal, too. It is both public and private. It is about relationships and friendships, it is about grief, injustice, human warmth and cruelty but also about the healing powers of love, art, and decency. The last installment of the Quartet was released in August 2020 with Summer.
Smith believes in art and its ability to deepen or highlight our understanding of the world and in every seasonal novel a piece of art or literature sets the tune or highlights a mood. Every volume in the Quartet provides meditations on the season for which it is named. In every volume there is imagery that underlines the specific character or essence of the season.
Autumn catches the national shift of mood after the Brexit vote and tells of an 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.
Spring focuses on the global migrant crisis and the abhorrent treatment of refugees. An artwork by Tacita Dean serves as a strong symbol of the avalanche, 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”.
Summer throws us right into the pandemic and the lockdown. And as in the previous installments with their cyclical titles, Summer cannot other than be concerned with time itself. Time is one of the central themes here. It is no coincidence that Einstein’s writings feature prominently in this final installment, with his theory of movement in time and relativity.
Questions:
What is the essence of time?
How are we attached to it?
What is our personal time?
Why can’t we remove ourselves from our time?
How do we come to understand what time is?
What do we do with time and what does it do with us?
Is death the end of a life?
What is the definition of a life?
It comes as no surprise to learn that our imagination is conceived, defined, confined and dependent on the Zeitgeist of our time.
The artworks used in Summer to represent or indicate the tune are moving pictures, specifically the films of Italian director Lorenza Mazzetti whose life and work were marked by the Nazis' massacre of her family in 1944 and Charlie Chaplin’s films The Great Dictator and The Immigrant. Films are a good medium to record time but can be also used to conjure with time, to play tricks with it. The imagery evoked in the prose is often of meadows, grass, butterflies and trees that throw long English shadows on sloping hillsides, but there is nothing saccharine or kitschy about it. “Summer is like walking down a road towards light and darkness“, there is happyness but also tragedy, one cannot be had without the other.
We meet the two siblings, Sacha, 16 and Robert, 13, both brilliant and linguistically playful adolescents. Sacha is a typical woke child of her time and thinks the world is in big trouble. Her brother Robert, full of mischief, gets himself in trouble with his uncompromising, often racist, destructive behavior. His is an intelligent spirit in search for answers but at the same time a victim of bullying injustice at his school. He is a big fan of Einstein. When, in a prank Robert on Brighton beach, superglues an egg timer to Sacha’s hand (giving her “time on her hands ha ha”; she responds in thanking him for this “bonding experience“), she is rescued by Art and Charlotte, the estranged couple whom we met in Winter, and this propels the characters, together with the mother of the siblings, off on a road trip to meet another character out of Autumn, 104-year-old Daniel Gluck, the neighbour girl Elizabeth and Art’s formidable Aunt Iris.
We also meet the sibling’s mother, Grace, a former liberal-minded actress turned Brexiteer with her store of memories that reach back to the late 80s. Now she lives alone with her two children, blaming the Brexit for the leaving of her husband who lives next door with a younger woman, even though he left her two years before the vote.
As with each of the previous novels, the present-day stories are juxtaposed with a period of history that resonates with the contemporary world. This time it’s the 1940s, when wartime Britain rounded up “enemy aliens” and detained them in the same facilities that later became the Immigration Removal Centres in Spring. We find Daniel Gluck, the 101-year-old whose deteriorating memories, dreams and transient realities we inhabited in Autumn, incarcerated as a young man with his father and many other Germans or men of German descendancy on the Isle of Man, at the Hutchinson Camp.
Of Daniel we learn that he once had a sister, Hannah, whom he lost to the war. They spoke of themselves as the summer brother and the autumn sister. In a strange reversal of roles, age and gender switched, David and Hannah resonate in Sacha and Robert and in a remarkable moment Robert, the 13-year-old walks into the room of the old man and is perceived by him as his lost sister.
This, as the volumes before it, has been a great joy to read. As always full of stories galore, radiant with wit and humour, thought-provoking puns and wordplay, lively dialogues, spirited and enlightened prose. It is a praise of memory, love, forgiveness, humour and hope. The pressure of finishing the last installment satisfactorily Smith has absolutely mastered with bravado. This Quartet is truly a significant literary achievement!
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