Winter by Ali Smith review – wise, generous and a thing of grace
In the second volume of a quartet, the winter solstice brings with it a cool clarity of vision, evergreen memories and a reworking of ageless myths
Friday 27 October 2017
Winter: the dead time, the midnight hour, the dying of the light. Winter: the time of guests, gifts, Christmas memories, cool clarity, the beginning. In the second part of her Seasonal Quartet, which began last year with Autumn, Smith brings all these winters into relationships that are astonishingly fertile and free. She calls up old stories and renews them, she finds life stubbornly shining in the evergreens. She looks out over a contemporary landscape of violent exclusion, lies, suffering (the book has been written and published so quickly that this summer’s tragedies are among its solsticial dark points), and fashions a novel which, in its very inclusiveness, associative joy and unrestricted movement, proposes other kinds of vision.
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| Proposing other kinds of vision … Winter by Ali Smith. Photograph: David Levenson |
This is not a continuation of Autumn, at least not in terms of plots and characters, but the books converse vociferously as they revise each other’s signs and symbols. Elderly Daniel began Autumn with a dream of rebirth and a coat of fresh leaves; an ageing Sophia begins Winter with a child’s head keeping her company. Daniel collected the youthfully gutsy paintings of Pauline Boty; Sophia loves Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures, their smooth stones both primitive and ageless.
Child’s head? Yes, just the head, not the whole child. The anxious, lonely Sophia, a retired businesswoman, would rather be in a more classic sort of story, “the kind of quality literary fiction in which the slow drift of snow across a landscape is merciful” and in which there are definitely “no heads”. But the head bobs about beguilingly in her field of view, a figure of death and life, but mostly life. We are in Cornwall, where the local saint Newlina had her head chopped off, but picked it up and walked off; when she stopped to pray, a fig tree grew from her staff. The head in Sophia’s house is endlessly lively: a child, an old man, a green man (snotty nostrils sprouting). All this is the bounty of Sophia’s imagination, which complicates her role as the commercial, conventional antagonist to her sister Iris, the wild child who left home to be an activist and chained herself to the fence at Greenham Common.
Protest is one of the novel’s great subjects. CND songs are its tune as much as the old Christmas numbers. It celebrates those who have thought in terms of society rather than self, who have had nightmares (of nuclear winter, of silent spring) and taken them seriously in every living daylight hour. Iris in her 70s is still tough, a citizen of the world, and has been working in Greece as the migrant boats come in. She does heroic things, but she is not the novel’s hero or its central consciousness: no single kind of vision is raised above the others. And there is no answer to the quarrel between the sisters, which is based on ideas of the individual’s role in the world. “I hate you,” they tell each other, and Sophia rests her head on Iris’s chest.
Together, or rather alternately, they have brought up a son, Arthur, who is understandably unsure of himself and not much of a king for Camelot – but then, as we read in the book’s first lines, “romance was dead. Chivalry was dead”. It doesn’t help that Arthur works for SA4A, the invented security company that patrolled the fences in Autumn and is now busy tracing infringements of copyright. He is trying to be a nature writer, earnestly saving up insights for his “Art in Nature” blog, looking up the etymologies of weather words, and waiting for snow (which is out of copyright) to salve his troubles. But this fretful Art, who takes his walks on YouTube and spends more time tweeting than birding, doesn’t give nature much of a chance. Nature responds with a giant piece of rock which comes swinging towards Arthur at the dinner table. It sounds like the clumps of landscape in the paintings of Julian Perry, but this one is real, with sand dropping off it, and it’s indoors.
Smith loves to bring wild profusions inside – whether a slice of cliff hanging in the dining room or an evergreen magnolia potted up as a Christmas tree. In all her fiction she proposes that figments of the mind are real things, to be prodded and tended and talked to. “Art is seeing things,” says Arthur’s friend, a little worried about him. “That’s a great description of what art is,” says Iris. “Where would we be without our ability to see beyond what it is we’re supposed to be seeing?”
The novel is a pattern of visitations. The floating child-stone-head is a visitor in Sophia’s body – though there’s no knowing which part: is it a floater in her eye as well as a hallucination? The optician found nothing wrong, but then the doctor in Smith’s story “The Beholder” didn’t spot the rose branches growing from the narrator’s heart.
Smith has always been interested in the whole spectrum of guests, from family popping by to extravagant strangers establishing themselves in the living room. Amber in The Accidental appeared with hair glowing like an angel and became the centre of a family without anyone knowing who she was. Now here is a young woman called Lux, sitting at Sophia’s kitchen table on Christmas night. She is a replacement for Arthur’s absent girlfriend – he found her at the bus stop reading a Chicken Cottage menu with striking intensity and paid her to come for Christmas. But who is she? A mythic light, an every-immigrant, and idiosyncratically herself, scrambling eggs, soothing Sophia as no one else can, finding poetry even in her work at a packing factory.
Moments of the past rise up into the present as if they, too, were visitors, alarming the hosts and making themselves at home. In the novel’s long midnight, the clock chimes 12 over and over as Sophia, between sleep and wakefulness, meets her previous lives. A Christmas Carol is intricately reworked, told in a voice that is Dickensian in its fluency and mobile empathy, and in its capacity to make myths real. Dickens is the spirit of the novel, but then so is the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, who is still sending uncannily verdant figures into the festive hall with mixed blessings of gifts and violence. “And romance was dead,” we read, but it’s not dead here, not yet, not with Smith conjuring in the forest. Woolf’s Orlando comes up glinting in new lights: Sophia has behind her the young nobleman kicking an old Moorish head. The winter wonders of her own time are not frost fairs but chemical leakages which kill birds in mid-air, but when she leans her back against an oak tree there is still a chance of peace.
Most of all, there is Shakespeare. Lux explains that the plays were the reason she came to England. She had read Cymbeline and thought: “if this writer from this place can make this mad and bitter mess into this graceful thing it is in the end, where the balance comes back and all the losses are compensated … then that’s the place I’m going”. Winter echoes with contemporary versions of Cymbeline’s madness and mess. Little is resolved at the end, but the novel works through correspondences that jump across bounds and make accord between unlike things. Leaping, laughing, sad, generous and winter-wise, this is a thing of grace.
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