Ali Smith set out to write four novels in a year, one for each of the seasons. I like the order of such a task; it appeals to me, to the way my brain organizes the world into lists and themes and categories; holidays coming and going and coming back again. I endeavored to read Tolstoy in winter, with snow on the ground; I like reading books about the places I’m going before I get there, so I feel like I have the place itself in my bones and in my blood. Smith’s mission appealed to me, because I saw a reflection of myself in it. Her books appeal to me because they surpass me so exquisitely.
Reading Ali Smith is, for me, an endeavor that feels a bit like throwing a handful of feathers at a wall covered in not-so-sticky tape. Smith is the fistful of feathers; I’m the wall. Not everything sticks, but I think the result is kind of cool.
Spring, like Autumn and Winter before it, is a novel told in interconnected fragments: it juxtaposes the lives of two characters in contemporary Britain, post-Brexit, with those of real-life figures including Katherine Mansfield, Charlie Chaplin, and Beethoven. It offers a modern story with a slight magical realism bent: a story of loss, yes, of mourning, but also of hope and rebirth and renewal. And Smith’s ever-poetic writing means that it also evokes several images that will stay with me for, I imagine, quite some time.
It refuses to tie up all of the threads of the story into a neat little bow, but it nevertheless offers more resolution and – for this reader – more satisfaction than the previous two tomes. I cannot wait until summer, to read the final installment, and more than that, I believe that reading these novels will soon become a ritual of my own, and hopefully, next time, a few more feathers will stick.