Autumn

It was the worst of times, it was the worst of times. Again. That's the thing about things. They fall apart, always have, always will, it's in their nature.

Usually I feel like Ali Smith is talking over my head, but with Autumn, she delivered a punch right to my gut. In a book allegorical, intertextual, and historical, Smith led me through a forest Grimm and touched me in places nostalgic and melancholic; even the precise vocabulary seemed moulded to my own particular tastes (I will always, somewhy, be moved by leaflitter and bone; by the vine twining through the voids of a human skull). My reaction is so personalised that I can't vouch for the universal appeal of this book, but for myself I'll say, “This is it. This is what I love.”

Here's an old story so new that it's still in the middle of happening, writing itself right now with no knowledge of where or how it'll end. An old man is sleeping in a bed in a care facility on his back with his head pillow-propped. His heart is beating and his blood's going round his body, he's breathing in then out, he is asleep and awake and he's nothing but a torn leaf scrap on the surface of a running brook, green veins and leaf-stuff, water and current, Daniel Gluck taking leaf of his senses at last, his tongue a broad green leaf, leaves growing through the sockets of his eyes, leaves thrustling (very good word for it) out of his ears, leaves tendriling down through the caves of his nostrils and out and round til he's swathed in foliage, leafskin, relief.

Autumn opens with Daniel Gluck (101 years old) washing up, naked but strong, on a beach and evaluating his situation: Is he dead? Could this be the afterlife he never believed in? When he spots young women in the distance, he's reminded of his nudity, and feeling shame, retreats to a nearby copse of trees to fashion a suit of leaves. Everything in this opening chapter – referencing Genesis, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Medieval fairytales – filled me with a sense of childlike awe (Tell me a story) and made me receptive to whatever Smith had in store for me. The next chapter introduces us to Elisabeth Demand – a London-based thirty-two-year old casual contract junior lecturer of Art History – and we watch as she navigates a sardonic (Kafkaesque?) interaction with a rural Post Office clerk. In the next chapter, we witness Elisabeth visiting Daniel in his care facility; where he lays comatose and she reads to him from Brave New World (ah, so that's why Daniel's psyche has slipped its bonds). Throughout the rest of the book, we skip back and forth through time – learning of Daniel's and Elisabeth's mutual and individual histories – and while I certainly found the plot engaging, I was most fascinated by the intellectual relationship between this unlikely pair. Daniel teaches (the fatherless and often neglected by her mother) young Elisabeth about art and literature and the ways in which one may bear witness to the world. When they are making up a story together and Elisabeth (whose imagined character has shot everyone except Daniel's character, who remains safely disguised as a tree) asks Daniel for a definition of “surrealist”, he replies:

This is. There they lie. The rain falls. The wind blows. The seasons pass and the gun rusts and the brightly coloured costumes dull and rot and the leaves from all the trees round about fall on them, heap over them, cover them, and grass grows round them then starts growing out of them, through them, through ribs and eyeholes, then flowers appear in the grass, and when the costumes and the perishable parts have all rotten away or been eaten clean by creatures happy to have the sustenance, there's nothing left of them, the pantomime innocents or the man with the gun, but bones in grass, bones in flowers, the leafy branches of the ash tree above them. Which is what, in the end, is left of us all, whether we carry a gun while we're here or we don't. So.

And again, I recognise that a passage like that is of particular appeal to me (in the specific word choices, imagery, and the nearly paragraph-length enumerative sentence that made me swoon), but I'm including it to underline the fact that this book was consistently of particular appeal to me. I'm sure I didn't get all of Smith's literary allusions, but I delighted in her wordplay and was thoroughly charmed by both Daniel and Elisabeth. Along the way, we are rooted to history – there is a brief section in Nazi-controlled Nice, the work of Pauline Boty (the only woman artist to enjoy success during the 60's London Pop Art scene) is unearthed and explored, Brexit features prominently in the modern parts – and this anchoring in reality made everything feel essential (Tell me this story). 

There's always, there'll always be, more story. That's what story is.

As the first volume in a proposed quartet (presumed to follow the seasons of the year), Autumn leaves me hooked. How can I possibly wait for Winter?

The Man Booker 2017 Longlist: 

4 3 2 1 by Paul Auster 
Days Without End by Sebastian Barry 
History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund 
Exit West by Mohsin Hamid 
Solar Bones by Mike McCormack 
Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor 
Elmet by Fiona Mozley 
The Ministry Of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy 
Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders 
Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie 
Autumn by Ali Smith 
Swing Time by Zadie Smith 
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead 

Eventually won by Lincoln in the Bardo, I would have given the Booker this year to Days Without End. My ranking, based solely on my own reading enjoyment, of the shortlist is:

Autumn

Exit West

Lincoln in the Bardo

Elmet

4321

History of Wolves