Writing is hard to spice up, especially when it comes to the way in which a story is told. A typical novel follows a largely chronological telling of a story from a limited amount of perspectives, and that’s that. Ali Smith’s first entry of her Seasonal Quartet of works, Autumn, seeks to challenge how cohesive, serious, and opinionated a novel can be.
At its heart, Autumn is a novel about a post-Brexit Britain and the importance of having a warm, unified, and welcoming society. It is a novel that desires to showcase the ways in which we connect, and how rules or expectations greatly detract from our ability to gel well with one another. It somewhat achieves this result, but suffers from being too direct in its message, or seemingly having no message at all at certain points.
The way in which this novel is composed is fascinating, because it goes against that serious sounding premise about unification. It has such a care-free use of rhythmic and odd prose, like poetry transformed into a novel. Moments of rhyme and randomness are also interspersed with very abstract chapters with repetitive lines, resulting in a confusing but, on Smith’s part, strangely confident read. This confidence is expanded through the fluent, flowing nature of the short sentences and regular line breaks, which probably amount to dozens across almost every page.
I must admit this style of writing isn’t for me, but it manages to keep the book interesting and rather engaging. It is almost like an anti-novel, being able to randomly jump between time and abstract ideas, whilst also throwing in near nonsensical four-page chapters between the wobbly story beats. Additionally, Smith has a strong aversion to using speech marks to note when a character is talking, which seems to go against almost all the rules of writing dialogue. Surprisingly, this was a choice I did not mind, and actually adapted to well when reading for extended periods of time.
The story that underlines the post-Brexit world view, however hard to make out, is simple at its core, but still endeared me despite the tangential way it is told. There is an underlying narrative about three central characters, but the novel jumps between the past, future, near-random moments in history, and things not even majorly relevant to the plot at all. There is also a lot of dream-like and abstract moments that don’t seem plausible, but cannot be ruled as irrelevant to the plot, making it a real pain to decipher a chronological and canon plot.
With that in mind, I still enjoyed what I could understand of the narrative between our main trio: Elisabeth Demand, Daniel Gluck, and Elisabeth’s mother. Towards the chronological start of the story, Daniel is the elderly neighbour of the single-parent Demand family in the 1990s who forms an odd, but wholesome, friendship with a young Elisabeth.
The present side of the story covers Elisabeth’s life in modern-day Britain, dealing with the hassle of writing a dissertation and maintaining her own life whilst visiting her mother and the near-comatose Daniel, who is now one-hundred-and-one years old. It sounds mundane, but the quirky nature of the characters — even if unrealistic — in addition to the bizarre way of recounting the story in varying order, and with a pick’n’mix of other sub-stories, make Autumn an intriguing read.
You never learn much about the characters, yet they feel very humanised and tangible, despite their aforementioned unrealistic behaviours and oddball ways of talking (especially Daniel and Elisabeth).
Smith uses Elisabeth and her mother to more directly explore the post-Brexit narrative, to middling effect. There is some political commentary on both the left- and right-wing views of the British government (and I get the sense Smith is more of a leftist), but it feels flimsy and dated now that we are well into the post-Brexit world. I grasp that Smith is attempting to use this entire novel to showcase the value of character and an unwillingness to cave to the demands and rules of others, but the execution still feels messy.
In retrospect, viewing this 2016 novel from a 2024 perspective, it feels akin to all these pieces of media that played on Covid-19 during the early 2020s; cashing in on a hot topic political issue that people feel naturally inclined to pick a side on. Am I accusing Smith of fishing for awards, or using Brexit to pedal books sales? No. But I am saying her commentary on Brexit and politics is pretty flat and takes more of a hippy-ish idea of getting along, and that the big right-wing suits have ruined everything.
For clarity, I have no issue with the views being expressed by Smith (and would’ve liked to stay in the EU myself), I just don’t think that her novel is as groundbreaking as many readers and left-wing journalists viewed it to be back in 2016. Then again, I wasn’t of voting age in 2016, so I’ve never had any reason to feel directly responsible or linked with the mess that is/was Brexit.
Overall, Autumn was a unique and daring read, but has cemented to me that I should probably not read any more of Smith’s work. I am sure the more pretentious among us will claim it is a work of genius, a true defiance of rules and whatnot, but its themes and writing style were not for me. To quote from the novel, it was too ‘arty art’ and lacked the clarity and substance I often seek from a full-length read.
For those who like a new perspective on reading, I recommend it. I certainly did not hate it, but I am not a read that is compatible with Smith’s jittery and clever casualness towards writing, or her ineffective way of commenting on (then relevant) political matters. Still, I’m glad to have given Autumn a read through.
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