![<i>Autumn</i>, by Ali Smith.](/web/20161215222209im_/http://www.theage.com.au/content/dam/images/g/t/2/h/q/7/image.related.articleLeadNarrow.300x0.gt2ikz.png/1481269681604.jpg)
FICTION
Autumn
ALI SMITH
HAMISH HAMILTON, $29.99
Autumn, the first in a season-themed tetralogy, is the latest by Scottish novelist Ali Smith, best known for her award-winning How To Be Both (2014). The sluggish cogs of publishing must have hustled because this is definitively a post-Brexit world.
It's autumn 2016 in Britain and there are fences and borders going up, literal and metaphorical, and people aren't interested in each other. It doesn't feel as much like fiction this year as it would have last.
As in How To Be Both, Smith experiments with time, flicking back and forth, painstakingly chronicling the social and political zeitgeist. It is no accident that 32-year-old Elisabeth Demand is a casual art history lecturer, "living the dream… if the dream means having no job security and almost everything being too expensive to do and that you're still in the same rented flat you had when you were a student over a decade ago". This sounds painfully real.
Daniel Gluck is her 101-year-old former neighbour, the kindly likes of which every street needs. Immigrant, art enthusiast and Elisabeth's unofficial babysitter when her mother was absent, Daniel's influence has helped shape her, and their friendship is the story's throbbing heart. He is now in a care facility, asleep. We flit to his youth, then snippets of him with Elisabeth as a child. Time is malleable; he is old but young, young but old, and long-ago memories are still close.
Elisabeth attempts to renew her passport at the post office, which is even more Orwellian than real life, and after many hours of waiting, her photo is rejected. Though she keeps her good humour, the bureaucratic nightmare is a signifier of how difficult it is to belong. Everything a passport denotes – who you are and where you are – is now harder to attain and maintain.
When Elisabeth chooses to study Pauline Boty, the only woman in the British pop art movement, an ancillary tale with musings on being an artist and a woman blossoms. "Ignored. Lost. Rediscovered years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered again years later. Then ignored. Lost. Rediscovered ad infinitum." In contrast to Daniel, in the autumn of his life, Boty died in her 20s.
In form and voice, Smith is reminiscent of Virginia Woolf. The cumulative effect of the whirling short narratives flowing from character to character and from one time to another show how the past explains the present. "Whoever makes up the story makes up the world, Daniel said. So always try to welcome people into the home of your story." Smith does this; her non-linear style is clever without being onerous. And though this is an unsympathetic place, there is kindness and humour, reminiscent both of the world of Douglas Coupland, and of Steven Amsterdam's recent The Easy Way Out. Daniel habitually asks Elisabeth what she is reading, and stories are referenced throughout, adding layers.
This coruscating novel of ideas features characters who are fascinating in their failings, secrets and successes, and the sheer inventiveness of the way in which Smith plays with time and form is a delight. In Elisabeth, in her mother and new lover, and in gentle Daniel, amid the critique of a world going mad, Smith's bold voice defies the toxicity of politics and offers rays of hope. Its timing is sublime. Bring on Winter.
Louise Swinn is a writer and publisher.